Here’s an edge. Unexplored, unproven, non-mathematical, indeed, everything that Dominic Cummings hates - along with anthropologists, civil servants and Europeans - but fuck him, because for all his brains he’s just a project manager who doesn’t have the heart to be human, and this edge is human. 

I was at Ludlow races with a friend. We were doing well. A sneaky 40/1 winner in the second, a 7/1 shot in the 4th. A smattering of losers and foolishness. Mustn’t grumble. The sun was shining on our backs, and we were time travellers, beamed into a farmer’s field in the early spring of 1954 (seriously, the entry gates only accepted cash – I’ll repeat that for the phone generation, the turnstile operators only accepted cash - and the only food outlets were a couple of plain-tabled huts serving pasty and chips and urn-tea like we were still in college refec in Lampeter 1982.)

Back to business. We wandered over to the paddock ahead of the fifth race. A juvenile hurdle full of unknowns. I said to Mike, “not many big trainers here, are there?”. No Skelton, no Nicholls. Their horses might be favourites but not worth actually turning up to see. In the middle of the small paddock I spotted the somewhat formidable, and undeniably hot, flat trainer Gay Kelleway, flanked by one owner, a jockey who has never ridden a winner, and a horse trading at 100/1. “What’s she doing here, all the way from Newmarket?” I said to Mike, though in truth I haven’t a clue where she lives.

Gotta be worth a sneaky fiver, I said. 100/1, though when I fired up Betfair it was now 80/1. Just for the craic. When you’re winning, you’re leaky like that. Oh, if only we could all be cyborgs like rational Dom. There is no scientific validity to the notion of "the hot hand", of the zone, of luck itself.

Fuck science. The jockey sets off in front. 20 lengths in front. This happens a lot. A bad horse with no chance of winning, gets loose on the lead, running too free. The other jockeys ignore him, like the peloton ignoring the sacrificial advertising lambs of the day, they know he’ll come back to them and they’ll sail on by. Rounding the home turn, the horse is still 20 lengths clear and I say to Mike, “it’s not actually pulling for its head, you know, I think he’s just stolen 20 lengths.”

There’s three hurdles to cross in the home straight. The crowd is completely silent. I let out a yelp. Mike turns to some posh couple next to us and explains why I had a bet. The horse gets the second all wrong. The peloton closes in for the kill. But gets there too late, as my boy wins at 80/1 to the sound of just one fat person shouting out “come on my babby”.

It was only a fiver but, hey, as the great WA Stephenson, who knew more about life than Dom ever will, used to say, little fish are sweet. Mike’s a bits and pieces, small-stakes, fun gambler – a placepot, a humble exacta. I looked at him. He looked at me. We high-fived. Not something we do. “I had a tenner each way”, he said.

As we passed by the paddock for an early exit, our job done, we passed Gay Kelleway on her way to the winner’s enclosure. The Racing TV announcer was pointing at her, laughing. “What, you think I’d come all this way to the arse of nowhere, for no reason?” she said.

Beautiful…  
  

At the Cheltenham Festival this year, the mighty Altior (unbeaten in 18 mainly top-class races) was greeted into the winner’s enclosure by Mike and Sam as “yep, brown, same as all the other horses”. Which is at least honest. Them is hard to tell apart. How trainers with 200 of them manage is a complete mystery to me, (and given Mick Appleby declared the wrong horse to run at Southwell today, sometimes to them also).
 
But, special horse he is. He just doesn’t grab you by the heart, plus he’s never a price to do so.  For gamblers the special horses defy the odds – literally. Atavus was a special horse, by way of example. I doubt you’ll have heard of him. He needed 7 furlongs, fast ground, to be drawn close to the rail, and guaranteed an unopposed lead. Without those stars aligning he was useless. But the four other times, he won good races at 33/1. Every time. God, I loved him.
 
Sergeant Cecil was a special horse. He won the three biggest staying handicaps one year, each time at double figure odds. What’s Up Boys won at five of the big festivals , chucked in a Hennessey for fun, and only lost the National because of his jockey, at prices from 40/1 to 14/1. Obviously, these are outliers, from a lifetime gambling. It’s very hard to be a great horse and keep going off at big odds.
 
Which, of course, brings us to Tiger Roll. Who has won the National, and at four Cheltenham Festivals, over 2m, 4m, hurdles, fences and the annual Cross Country nonsense. I honestly can’t think of a more versatile horse. Plus, I’ve backed him every single time. Two months ago, as a loosener, he ran in a 2m 4f Grade 2 hurdle for speedy youngsters and won without coming off the bridle at 33/1. Which was nice.
 
At Cheltenham he won the Cross Country race so easily most people there wondered why he wasn’t running in the Gold Cup. Except me, who was so excited I fell over at the Cheese Wedges cheering him on.  And I promise you something. This little rat of a horse (as his shit of an owner has it) was greeted as a far greater hero than Altior. And now he’s likely to be the shortest priced horse for decades to win the National again (hopefully). Currently he’s 7/2. Is it a fair price? I’ve no idea. It’s an argument about value that horse-racing enthusiasts on racing forums digest like a holy mobius strip of the unanswerable.  
 
Who cares, I have him at 12s. Yes, I suspect he’s going to be beaten by some unfathomable outsider who might go on to be the next Atavus or What’s Up Boys, or even Tiger Roll.  But this year, possibly for the first time since Red Rum, I think the race really is about one horse. Enjoy.        

​ 

Bets out since last post - lots
Loss since last post £190
(Tough Saturday. Better Sunday.)
 


One of the reasons I thought I’d have a go at drawing is because I have 10 unused artists’ pads in my stationery box. Big ‘uns (size).  And why is that, pray, I hear you ask.
 
Well, thank you for asking. Because that’s what I write my poetry on. I start in the middle of the white page with whatever “killer line” has engaged me and draft and play and fiddle, until what usually happens is that in the heat of composition, the killer line itself, around which the very soul of the poem hugged, is deleted from the final version. Which is, at least, my excuse for my poems having no killer lines. Yeah, I know, TS Eliot probably did it differently.
 
But, as I haven’t written any poetry this calendar year, I was left with these unused artists’ pads. So, in wondering what I could possibly do with them, and after pondering on this tricky conundrum for some considerable time, I thought, hey, I know what they’d be good for…
 

​

Bets £400
Loss on day £100
  

"I can gather all the news I need on the weather report."
 
This is one of my friend’s favourite lyrics. And it's quite close to what I’ve been trying to do this year. Twitter is dead to me, and I have mainly been missing the news and am much happier as a result. Plus, the news is so repetitive and circular, I'm not even less informed.   
 
Instead I've been thinking about two other lines in this old Paul SImon classic. 
Firstly, what of this, in the Trump era, as a shout from a New York past to a present:

"Let your honesty shine now, like it shines on me."

Yes, that’s something to aspire to.  Away from the posturing, and the politics and the proto-fascism, one thing I don’t get about America voting this lying cunt President is what do they tell their children. You know, like when them pesky kids test the boundaries – maybe tell a wee fib? (And this is Republican, Christian, Silent Majority, Middle America stuff). Do they tell them of George Washington and the cherry tree, as every generation in that America has done hitherto? And, if they do, what do the kids say? “Nah, fuck that, grandma, I'm gonna be like Trump.”?
     
Which leaves me with this:
 
"Half of the time we’re gone and we don’t know where and we don’t know where." 



​

Total bets at weekend £1020
Profit £250
(Nicholls and Tizzard provided nice wins for their lesser-fancied hopes in the big handicaps and chucked in the forecasts as well. Richards repeated this feat on Sunday, but I missed the forecast, being lost on a hill in Shropshire.)

Well, not lost really. We were blown off one side of Brown Clee so tried to navigate a route down we hadn't tried before, without a map. Now, I'm a good map-reader - an art very much nearing extinction - and even more so considering I have absolutely no sense of direction. Anne, on the other hand, is nothing special at reading a map, but usually can tell in which vague direction to head. Together we rub along just fine. 

Except this weekend she was right narky (Brexit, a lost sock, leaves, work and her brother, apparently)  and had it in her head that my basic approach of just walking downhill was going to end in disaster. I kept marching forward confidently, she kept saying we were going wrong. It got so she was desperate for me to be proved wrong. She wanted us to come upon a crossroads where she could say "see, I told you so",  you know, something like a sign saying car-park 3 miles, or a newsflash saying Nissan had abandoned Sunderland. 

Anyway, we didn't. I marshalled us directly down to the car without incident. Which was the light getting through the cracks, maybe.    
   

Bets Out £430
Profit on day £30
 
There was a question on the deliriously lateral Only Connect last night that was about The Mousetrap and on which I scored 2 points, which is almost cause for a champagne celebration in our house (at least until the missing vowels round, of which I got 12 right ahead of the buzzer last night - just saying).
 
I knew the answer because, when I was about 14, I was actually taken by my mum to see The Mousetrap – for no other reason than that I was reading a lot of Agatha Christie at the time (all of Agatha Christie at the time, actually), and that it was the longest running play in the West End – twenty-odd years - which seemed unfathomable at the time.
 
The play was terrible, the acting worse and the atmosphere touristy and funereal, (a foretaste of my general experience of the theatre; “backache, a rumbling tummy and posh people spitting at each other” as Giles Coren memorably described it, shortly before getting (and losing) a gig as a TV theatre critic.   
 
Thing is, that was 32 years ago. And The Mousetrap’s still going strong…
 
As Woody Allen once noted – eternity lasts a very long time, particularly towards the end…




​no poetry