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Guest Blog - Matt Nicholls

Well thank god climate change is over for another year, the roads didn’t melt, none of the staff burst into flames and the apocalypse didn’t arrive after all…back to talking about the Tory leadership contest….

I had written a long and in my opinion very interesting blog on the new stick rules, however david slightly stole my thunder and I don’t want to keep going over the same thing, I’m sure the ‘steering group’ have their own reasons for bringing in these farcical new rules that only serve to muddy the waters even further..

Positivity is what is needed today  and we have plenty of reason for that…the winter horses have come back in looking fantastic, I love getting to know all the new horses and seeing how they adapt to our regime and the same goes for the staff. It’s the bain of my life dealing with staff sometimes but we have a very good group here at present and the majority have been with us for a few years now, often since racing school.

We have one runner today at Worcester with Ami des Flots, for our thoughts of her chances click here

It's something I really enjoy, continuing to help develop people who come from the racing schools and we have numerous examples of people who are still with us after 2 or 3 years and have developed into high class staff..maybe we are good to work for?! 

There is plenty of exciting talent around and I hope we can get plenty of improvement from the string in general, I think it’s fair to say there was a lack of consistency last year and we seemed to be 5% short on a lot of occasions as you can see if you look how many placed horses we had… Kim has often said how we differ on our views on summer racing and it is something I would love us to be more involved in, I do agree however that this years summer fair has been particularly poor, a blind man can see there is far too much racing for it to be competitive so why the obvious can’t be addressed is beyond me, perhaps the same ‘steering group’ are in charge of the fixture list..would less racing not mean more prize money and bigger attendances as there wouldnt be so many meetings after a slice of the pie..?

Anyway, positivity I said…on the personal front it’s been a busy summer, it all started with a charity football match at The Hawthorns thanks to Richard Sheppard and John Webber, we won on penalties and yes I did score the winner.

Evelyn and I decided it best not to fly anywhere this summer, we have had a couple of weekends at Evelyn’s sisters wedding which was great fun, and generally seeing family and friends, we also went to the cinema a couple of times which was a novel experience for me, Top Gun, absolutely brilliant, not often a sequel is better than the original, trying to get the staff to call me Maverick didn’t work well; Jurassic Park however was a real let down.

The Potts wedding party, a great night and really good fun, they must be a popular couple, although as Graham said ‘it’s amazing how many friends you have when you put on a free bar!

I’ve spent a lot of time refreshing Twitter to see who Forests latest signing has been and I’m lucky enough to have tickets for our opening two games (did I mention we are premier league) so Ive managed to convince Evelyn that a long weekend staying with my family would be nice, she won’t realise I’ll be leaving her with my mother whilst I go to the game until she reads this, before our life gets turned upside down…I can’t tell you how excited I am

We also met David and Viktoria at the 2000 Trees Festival, it was the first festival we had ever been to and as expected it will be the last, I was tucked up in bed by the time David started crowd surfing..

Enough rambling for my first ever blog..maybe I’ll do a few more in the future when Kim is short of a few things to say..I’m off for breakfast, don’t normally have any but I went to Prithvi last night and I’m starving, not a chicken bhuna or Nan bread in sight!!