Lord Ilsley’s Blog #1.
“Could you help out with the new website?”
This was a tentative question posed by my baby brother and Glorious Goodwood winning trainer just after I returned to West Ilsley at the start of July.
“You could even do a blog if you want!” he added, as if that would seal the deal on the offer of a lifetime.
Having written a stupid, fanciful and downright ridiculous blog on the yard’s previous website (I think mickchannon.tv still lurks somewhere in an overgrown corner of the internet graveyard) he surely knew what to expect, but he’s now become a passenger after the initial question.
That’s how delegation in a vacuum of any editorial scrutiny works after all.
So, having been an assistant trainer for 10 years, along with website editor and all round stress-head, I’m back at Hodcott, reinvented as a useful, unskilled Idiot - the only difference is that I’m now living in Grandma’s bungalow.
I ought to stress here that I’m not living with Gma and it’s not that Gma has snuffed it - she’s alive and well and living near my Uncle Phil’s side of the family in Bishops Waltham. It’s just that she’s about to turn 102 in the next month and she’s busy organising her birthday party.
Gma & the Assistant at Bishops Waltham House - Gma is the resident
Macca, Jagger and Rod are all willing to do a turn for free at East Horton Golf Club on October 22nd, so don’t miss that one.
Moving Gma out was my idea actually, because I care more than anyone else in my family about her well-being. That’s the type of guy I am.
Plus, No. 4 Hodcott Bungalows is one of the finest residences in the world. Just look at Google Earth.
The role of ‘Useful Unskilled Idiot’ wasn’t advertised anywhere, simply because it’s a role that only I am fit to fill.
Sure, we have a maintenance team who cut, harrow and roll the gallops. But these lads have the skills and know-how to fix mechanical stuff for heaven’s sake and none of them have crashed the Manitou into the Colt’s yard whilst loading the muckheap onto the trailer - something that I’ll no doubt achieve over the course of time.
I’ll have to get a hurry on in that regard though, because the ancient old yard’s days are numbered - with a new development planned in the near future.
The future looks bright then, which it didn’t when I left West Ilsley seven years ago. I lost my way you see, as I navigated a path through a grief laden period that I wrote about in my columns in the Racing Post back in 2019.
That period saw me escape to Australia, as I dealt with a chronic mid life crisis at Chris Waller’s yard in Rosehill. It was there where I led up Shraaoh to win the Sydney Cup and enjoyed the best day of my racing life when Yes Yes Yes won the Everest.
Yes Yes Yes - Notice how the fans are cropping me out of shot.
Horses, most animals in fact, have a knack of pulling you through the bad times and there was another - the great Sixties Icon upon whom I doted during four years at Norman Court Stud.
Super Sixties Icon - My Hero
I really like horses me.
Anyway, the role of UUI is one I genuinely feel born to. I’m ADHD apparently but that comes with certain benefits. I’m able to write quite a bit, express myself in a certain manner of honestly and also focus on stuff that really doesn’t matter.
But whilst it’s stuff that may not matter to most - it really, really matters to me .
For example, we’ve had green bins here for ages. The ones that you are supposed to put garden refuse in. There’s 15 in all around the estate but nobody has used them because the council don’t collect green waste.
So I’ve arranged to get them taken away this week.
I hate clutter.
Ivy - now there’s another personal nemesis on which I’ve also focused on of late - mainly because it’s eating the staff houses. Ivy is a bastard to get rid of but a chainsaw helps. After several hours of graft, I discovered a window behind Bungalow No. 7 last week.
Now you see it….
Now you don’t…..
I was proud of that.
Then there was the fire hydrant outside No. 12. He's been in a terrible state for far too long and he was always a target for my seething resentment. He would have been red in the beginning, but I’m guessing that was in the 1960’s when the staff housing was built at West Ilsley and he was showing the ravages of time.
He was a peeling pink colour and where the paint wasn’t falling away, his bald bare casing was reminiscent of my head after a recent holiday in Turkey.
The lad had really lost his dignity.
So I set about restoring him to his former glory in the hope that he remains unused for the foreseeable - but unused in a rather more eye-catching fashion.
So that was my big task last week. I’d already destroyed three gardens by lunchtime and blunted the chainsaw in the process before setting about the hydrant with a wire brush and sandpaper.
Primed…..
By Thursday evening he was a rather dull grey with primer coat and I went to bed fearing that if West Ilsley went up in flames that night with the attending fire crew unable to locate the fire hydrant in the dark, I’d be in trouble. As I lay restless and paranoid into the wee small hours, images of spending ten years behind bars for not adhering to fire regulations raced through my mind.
Thankfully, that didn’t happen but, on Thursday this did…..
BOOM!
Now I’m annoyed by the brickwork around him.
But that’s ADHD.
A date with the power washer isn’t far away.
That may have to wait though because we also got the old digger working yesterday and the sort of damage I can inflict with that makes my mind boggle. It can’t be that hard to work can it?
Anyway, that’s who I am and I’m sure you’ve enjoyed what’s surely been the most fascinating insight into the mind of one of the country’s leading Useful Unskilled Idiots.
There’s so much more I could write, the adventures of the murderous ‘Cat Thing’ who moved with me from Norman Court Stud for example need telling.
I moved into his one bedroom flat on my return from Australia and we still have a Landlord/Tenant relationship to this day. That’s a tale to be told another day though because we have to be frugal at the moment - we need to pad out our content on this is a brand new website you see - a website that I was asked to ‘help out’ with by my baby brother, but we all know what he really meant.
It’s a website that I’ll have to ‘do’ as Jack tirelessly endures the joys of very few horses ever running fast enough for his liking whilst his Assistant tells him what he should have done instead and should do in the future.
He’s done all right to be fair has Jack - but has he ever painted a fire hydrant?
I think not.
Tara for now,
Michael Jnr
In the next LIB: My adventures with a psychopath called Cat Thing, how to captain a village cricket club and loads of other bollocks that have nothing to do with the day to day running of a professional racing establishment……..