Farewell to a horse who embodied why we fall in love with these special animals

Last Wednesday provided one of the most satisfying victories of the week, not at the Cheltenham Festival but in division one of the 0-50 classified stakes over a mile at Kempton.

This is not because I am an all-weather-obsessed Flat junkie who will do anything to take away from Cheltenham. It's because the horse who won the race, and the princely first-place prize-money of £2,781.67, was Cristal Pallas Cat.

A regular in low-grade races, almost always at all-weather courses in the south, Cristal Pallas Cat was a horse for whom I have held something of a soft spot since my colleague Lee Mottershead wrote about him in the summer of 2019, after he had ended a cold streak for his connections in a little race at Brighton, prompting significant joy.