Shut the motorway, my pony needs to hitch a ride to Chetenham racecourse "It is of paramount importance that we get this horse to its race at Cheltenham," they said. The rather timid RAC repair man agreed and determined that the only way of moving the "temperamental racehorse" safely from one lorry to the other would be to shut the motorway - in both directions for a mile. To their astonishment the police duly agreed. So the whole M40 was brought to a halt. The ramp came down and a rather baffled traffic policeman watched as the "temperamental racehorse," closer in size to a Shetland than Frankel, was led down onto a deserted M40 with no traffic to be seen in either direction. The Marshalls kept their heads down, said nothing and reloaded The Black in the friend's lorry. Charlie and the pony got there in time to run as his despondent mother sat on the hard shoulder waiting for the wheel to be changed. Afterwards, as the family celebrated a "mid-division" result in the bar, an irate racegoer on the next table announced to his mate that he had missed the first two races - because of a traffic jam on the M40. It's Goodbye Sailor, hello Solicitation. We have changed horses midstream. It turns out that Hello Sailor, the three-year-old gelding in which I had a tail-feather, has gone back home. Having failed to build upon his second in a Windsor maiden, he has gone on a gap year to find himself and think about life. If you thought I had gone rather quite on him - that will be why. Instead our happy little syndicate has been leased a ready-to-run Lawman two-year-old by our kind trainer, Ralph Beckett. And so our hopes rise again. Surely they cannot be dashed twice?