A miserable day today, made slightly worse as I'm not able to visit Dad at the moment as he still hasn't had the vaccine and with the new Covid variant I don't want to risk it.  He was supposed to have had it last Friday. However, the batch of vaccines arrived at his local doctors on Thursday and they forgot to put it in the fridge so the whole batch was ruined..... I guess it was very honest of them to admit to this mistake but you would have thought with something as important as this they would have checked and double checked.  It makes you wonder how often this has happened in other surgeries.

The other sad news is that my lovely Uncle Ross was taken to hospital this morning with Covid - The doctor has been monitoring him at home but he took a turn for the worse and was rushed in to go on oxygen. He is such a larger than life character, always full of fun and even with the fairly recent death of his beloved wife, Margaret, he is such a joyful character. It is awful to think that he is on his own as he wasn't allowed to have any of his family with him. He was really fit as he played a lot of top level golf so hopefully that will help him pull through.

Ross and Margaret - Such a glamorous couple

Ross with Margaret shortly before she died

During this misery it is lovely to have the horses to play around with even though the weather isn't great. Lucy and Ella came in on Sunday to give Archie and Flo a little jump over the hurdles. Flo was a keen as mustard but jumped like a stag and Archie is getting better all the time. He finds everything so easy that after he has jumped the same hurdle a couple of times he gets bored and starts looking around and not concentrating. He needs to start jumping the big fences sooner rather than later. 

I'm thinking of running Top Garry in the Dick Saunders novice chase at Leicester on Feb 18th. He may as well have a run and then if pointing starts again at the end of March he will be ready to go back to pointing. Fingers crossed that pointing does start again this season as under rules doesn't really light my fire and I certainly wouldn't want to run the maidens over the regulation fences until they have had more experience.