For Tommy...

I thought long and hard about what to write when it came to Tommy Berry's emotional win in the Chairman's Handicap yesterday at Royal Randwick.  I've been looking forward to The Championships beginning after working closely with the team at Racing NSW for some 7 months now.  The weather was bitterly disappointing and of course no one could have possibly foreseen the heartbreak that was Nathan Berry's death just before the Golden Slipper.

I felt tears prickle my eyes when Tommy Berry drove The Offer past me, and I had to fight them back when he raised his hands in a blown kiss to the heavens.  Instead of trying to come up with words of my own, I will leave you with the words of former Prime Minister, the Hon Paul Keating.  "His father died suddenly at the age of 60. He’d walked down the street to put a bet on the races and “he died sitting on the side of the road".  Keating was washing the car when someone came along looking for his father’s house. It was a decade before be could even talk about it".
 “It’s always with me. You kind of never get over it. But you never want to get over it. There is a place for sadness and melancholy....  We don’t want to be sparkling and happy all the time. You need the inner life, the inner sadness. It is what fills you out”.
I think heartbreak is unquestionably hard to recover from.  Does it ever leave you?  I don't think that it does....











Happier Days.  Nathan winning the Magic Millions on Unencumbered.  Sometimes it's really painful looking back on photos of people you've lost.  Other times it can be comforting.  January doesn't seem so long ago....


Identical twins.  I could often hardly tell them apart, although there were subtle differences to them.




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