it is january 2022. here we go again.

​I do not celebrate the start of a new year; it is why at five in the morning I am able to sit behind my laptop still believing my imagination is at its fullest setting before the rising of day’s new dawn. My ambivalence toward New Year festivities is born out of a work-life of pre-dawn starts, long days working with the minimum of breaks, with the resulting closing down of faculties long before the dying of the sun. It was the lifestyle forced upon Neanderthals through their inability to either invent artificial light or to develop a method that allowed them to carry burning embers to illuminate their immediate surroundings. As with Neanderthals, I rely more on instinct than any inherent ability to improvise my way through life. It is why research is such a hardship to me and why I prefer the ‘stream of consciousness’ form of writing. Laziness comes into too, I suspect.
The opening paragraph, a contrivance that is a more scenic route to move the narrative forward than simply by getting straight to the point, I hope you appreciate, is to escort you to my thoughts on the Challow Hurdle run at Newbury last week and the race programme in both Britain and Ireland. 
I do not like the Challow Hurdle. Or the Tolworth Hurdle at Sandown on January 8th, 2022. There must be, of course, races with conditions that allow trainers to run their better novice hurdlers outside of the hurly-burly of commonplace novice hurdle races. Yet races like the Challow and Tolworth are given status and prize money way beyond their worth to spectators and punters. The Challow, for instance, holds the unique position of being the last Grade 1 of the year in Britain, yet can anyone put their hand to their heart and claim it is worthy of such a position in the race programme? It’s place should be as a subsidiary event to the Mandarin and run as a Grade 2 at best.
Yes, Paul Nicholls and Nicky Henderson would shed tears of frustration if the two races were downgraded to Grade 2’s or limited handicaps as I believe would be more beneficial to the sport. Similar races in Ireland equally soak-up prize money and can only be tolerated as Mullins and Elliott are not scared to run 2, 3 or 4 horses against each other, allowing them to determine on the racecourse the pecking order of their novices. This is not enough, though, for me change my stance that outside of the Cheltenham Festival there should no Grade 1 novice hurdles. Or Grade 1 novice chasers, for that matter. Such high-octane races should be reserved for mature horses of proven calibre. 
I contend that part of the reason why the Irish are becoming more dominant at both the Cheltenham Festival and in the major jumps races in general is because British trainers as a whole have so few top-notch chasers and hurdlers the races in the calendar for these horses are becoming less and less competitive, meaning that come the battles of the Festival the British-trained youngsters are found out for want of battle-hardened experience. Winning the Challow Hurdle on the bridle, as Stage Star did last week, offers no clues as to what he might achieve against the battalion of Irish novices that will arrive on our shores next March.
This leads me on to my wish for 2022.
I would like there to be a complete and thorough review of the race programmes in Britain and Ireland, both flat and National Hunt, with the aim of the harmonisation of race-meetings in both countries so that there is no clash of races as happened over the recent Bank Holiday with the Welsh Grand National and the Paddy Power at Leopardstown, the two most competitive races of the whole week, and which occurs with more minor races on an almost daily basis.
You so often hear trainers critical of there being, as an example, no 2-mile races on the flat for 10-days and then to have 2 on one-day. And when a trainer complains, as Nicky Henderson is wont to do, that he can’t run a horse because there are no races for them, he should be listened to and the race programme for the following season adjusted and perhaps as a stopgap a race invented so that for the benefit of the sport the master of Seven Barrows can get a run into that good horse. The sport has an obligation of care and should exercise its duty to keep Nicky Henderson as stress-free as possible during the period between the King George and the Cheltenham Festival. Like him or loathe him, we need him as much as Churchill needed Montgomery.
And this brings me back to races like the Challow and Tolworth. Why these races are given protection from change, when races that were once considered trials for the Gold Cup like the John Bull at Wincanton are demoted to handicap status, is beyond me. British jumps trainers are hindered either side of the Christmas Bank Holiday by a race programme that limits options. Take 2 of Nicky Henderson’s horses. He obviously planned for Shishkin to have 3 runs before Cheltenham in March. Because of a setback, that plan had to be revised to the Desert Orchid and either the Clarence House that might come too quick after Kempton or the Game Spirit that Henderson believes is too close to Cheltenham, with no other option available to him. If Ascot comes up heavy and he backs out of the Clarence House, that leaves Henderson caught between a rock and a hard place and that should not be the case. It is just melodrama if we collectively wring our hands and take a woe-is-me attitude at the drubbing by the Irish last March if our trainers are offered no help by the race-programme.
Now, I accept that Henderson is the most finicky trainer on the planet but he also happens to train many of our leading hopes in defeating the Irish at Cheltenham. He should be helped by the race programme, not hindered. Yes, he has had plenty of opportunity to have run Chantry House more than once, and that was in a no-contest event, before the King George, and as the horse is in need of more experience in the top-flight it should be possible for Henderson to plan 2-more races pre the Gold Cup – he could find a handicap for the horse, of course, a strategy that would not frighten Paul Nicholls – and even if he chose the 2-race option, it is possible the weather might make the obvious route impossible to achieve. It is why races like the old John Bull were so invaluable.
I rest my case.
For now.