It’s Chritmas Eve today, and we suddenly lost our kitty Maxie.  There are no words.  Just tears, as we came to terms with what felt like the final gift of 2020.  We are also in 14 days strict home isolation following my brief working visit to Sydney which alas and woe coincided with the start of the Northern Beaches Cluster.  This year has really sucked and we are utterly heartbroken at the loss of our constant companion and friend.  He was only 8 years old, and our determined little bad ass is no more.  Enough 2020, enough….

I hadn’t been to Mordialloc Beach in ages, possibly not since Nelly was racing.  More recently it was Altona that we journeyed to in the early hours of the morning (being a 1.5 hour drive from home).  Mordialloc is much closer to home, only taking about 35 mins at an early hour.  It was fun to be back at “Nelly’s Beach” and getting the Ciaron Maher/David Eustace runners like Cox Plate winner SIR DRAGONET and smart sprinter ANDERS, as well as a big team from Micky Price’s stable, including G1 Thousand Guineas winner ODEUM, who is a real doll.

  The call it The Race Where Legends are Made.  It is run at The Valley, or The Cauldron as we like to call it.  Like many things in 2020 this year’s renewal was a sobering and sad reminder of what we lost.  A Cox Plate without crowds. Darryl Braithwaite singing ‘The Horses’ to a handful of people there in a purely working capacity.  As they ran clips of previous winners, filled with cutaways to joyous scenes of the crowd interacting with each famous winner of one of our most prestigious races, I could feel tears prickling at the back of my eyes and I had to walk away.   The race was won by the imported SIR DRAGONET.  He’s a really nice horse and he gave Bossy another Cox Plate victory and Ciaron Maher and David Eustace their first winner in the race.  We’d photographed the horse in the 2019 Epsom Derby, a moment that felt like a lifetime ago when he swept past me at the 150m to victory. So glad to be there though.   We’d been forced off trac...