Happy Derby Day Ma’am (as in jam)

The stunning Manduro, Bonfire’s sire

HM the Queen, celebrates her Jubilee Saturday at Epsom today. I hope she sees that handsome headcase, Bonfire (by Manduro), win. There is nothing so yawnsome as the Ballydoyle mafia winning all the classics and, so far, this season, their record is 3 out of 3.

I am not sure what the purpose of a jubilee is, never having had one of my own. Are we meant to be celebrating longevity, or just the fact that she hasn’t thrown the crown in? Does having a Queen make *a material difference to our lives, or has she provided decoration for our currency and postage stamps. It’s just a question, I do not have the answers.

This is a snapdat I took of Her Maj racing at Newbury a few years ago.

*Constitutional experts can consider themselves in the same category as the Ballydoyle mafia.

Why I believe in Frankel, but not Chelsea

Frankel pulled me back a little from the brink yesterday. I don’t mind saying I shed a tear or two, not when the race was won, but a little way into that wide verdant straight; at the point when Frankel indicated he was ready to go on from his pacemaker, Bullet Train. It seemed to me as if the horse was saying, with a slight nod of the head, to the man on board, Tom Queally, ‘Come on mate, let’s go.’ And they did. And I thought to myself, ‘Fuck me, it’s Pegasus’ and he doesn’t even know it, he just is.

That’s why I believe in Frankel, because he will do his best, regardless. He won’t fall out with the owner, the trainer, the lad, or even the jockey – he’ll just put his head down and get on with it, in his own remarkable, mythical style. One day, perhaps, Frankel won’t win. I don’t want to ever see it, but if I do, I’ll still believe because I’ve seen the essence of the horse.

That’s where I have a problem with Chelsea. I can’t ever get to the spirit of the side. They remind me alternately of a bunch of mercenaries with no loyalty, except to the self, or a cadre of the worst kind of public service union members who work to rule, to the detriment of their service. There is one exception to this: Didier Drogba, whose gradual transformation from habitual box dropper and tantrum thrower to staunch goal-scoring servant, shines brightly enough to cast many of his team mates demeanours into sharp relief. Drogba, of course, looks like he may have played his last game, and Di Matteo, whose main attribute seems to have been that he is not Andre Villas Boas, is uncertain of his future.

And that sums up why I can’t believe in Chelsea, a club that is run at the top by a plutocrat, and on the pitch by the whims and moods of the dressing room. Di Matteo has done well they say, and why should they not, given the 2012 silverware, but haven’t the recalcitrant squad of AVB’s reign merely consented to play since the caretaker manager came in? On their finest night, instead of being able to fully enjoy the scenes of celebration, a neutral looks at the assemblage and sees a lot of luck, not much soul, and not nearly enough of whatever it is that Frankel and Drogba have got.

Winners with heart & soul

This post was partly inspired by a conversation with a Chelsea fan not long after AVB had departed. A lifelong fan, his disappointed and pained recognition of the pumped-up egos in the Stamford Bridge dressing room was palpable. This morning I imagine he has a well-deserved headache and a hoarse throat and natually all the previous suffering is instantly forgiven. Football fans have strong stomachs, suffering goes with the territory, no joy without pain. That’s all fine and understood, but I can’t quite forget the head-shaking of earlier this year and the expression of the fact that his team wilfully and frequently just chose not to turn up at the game.

Will Frankel save me?

Once upon I time, I followed racing closely: I read all the form, checked all the results, knew the going across the country, who was hot, who was not, and who might have a little bit in hand of the handicapper.

I could never imagine a day when I would no longer do any of the above, but it came, and my life is the poorer for it. On Saturdays, especially Saturdays such as today, I used to smell the expectation in the air. Not just for racing either, for events like West Ham -v- Blackpool and Bayern Munich -v- Chelsea. I even wrote a poem about the Champions League Final once…

Now, these things pass before my eyes and I don’t seem to care. And I want to get back to the place in me that does care, even if it’s only a little bit more than not at all, because that feels more like me. So, if Frankel in the Lockinge in the town of my birth can’t raise the heartbeat a little this afternoon, I may as well give myself the sporting last rites and take up wood turning, or something.

Fingers crossed.

Essex Tractor

Curiously, not a Prime Minister or a Deputy in sight.

‘Jumping off the edge of the world’: why Becher’s Brook must go

Let me be clear about this: watching Red Rum win (and come second) in Grand Nationals on black and white telly was my 1970s childhood. Red Rum was, along with Muhammed Ali, my sporting hero. And, because memory works in mysterious ways, I remember watching one, or the other, or both win, in black and white vision in the back room of my great-grandmother Walker’s little council house in Leicester; although I must’ve seen both of them elsewhere too. For me, the sport, my childhood and the family, the love of it all, are inextricably linked; so I can’t hate the Grand National.

Equally, these days, I can’t watch it. The reason being, that the statistics speak for themselves. I know, the odds are that horses will fall, and that from those falls, some horses will die.

I also know now, having looked at the Wikipedia statistics here, that horses are most likely to die in a fall at Becher’s Brook – the awkwardly-shaped fence that horses jump as obstacle number #6 and #22 and that jockeys have described as ‘jumping off the edge of the world.’

Of the 68 horse fatalities in 165 runnings of the race (and I think that 165 includes 3 runnings at Gatwick during the First World War), 15 horses have died in incidents that involved Becher’s Brook. That’s more than double the fatalities of the second most deadly fence (obstacle #4 & #20, that has no name) which has 7 fatalities associated with it. Becher’s Brook is unusual, not in its height of 5 feet – there are 6 others of 5 feet and the tallest, The Chair, is 5’2″, but because its landing side is so much lower than the take off (estimated to be between 6 and 10 inches lower). It was named after Captain Becher parted company with his horse, Conrad, at the obstacle in the first officially run Grand National in 1839. It is a fence designed, not just for jumping, but to catch horses out.

And it does.

And it must stop.

I have read people saying that, yesterday, Synchronised got up from his fall at Becher’s and galloped on, therefore his fatal injury cannot be attributed to the fence, just subsequent ill-luck in riderless running. I would say, how can we know? And then there is According to Pete who also died after being brought down at the same obstacle on the second circuit.

There are other changes, I am sure, that could, and perhaps should be made to the race. But the continued acceptance of a notorious and tricky fence that claims more horses’ lives than any other in the race is a disgrace. The statistic for Becher’s Brook is one that we, those who follow racing under either code, should not continue to stand for.

Captain Becher and Conrad came a cropper in the naming of the fence in 1839. In the one hundred and seventy-three years that have elapsed let us stand for progress, but primarily the welfare of the horse. Let the sad losses of According to Pete and Synchronised be the very last victims of Becher’s Brook.

I, for one, have had enough. Have you?

Synchronised

According to Pete

Free epamphlet for labrador lovers (and terrapins)

I have a free download this Grand National weekend for my latest bitesize memoir, about walking dogs in the East End of London.

This story includes my close encounter with terrapins in the ‘hood.

Click on the cover to download.

Grand National 2012

I have said everything I would ever have to say about the Grand National in the past. The only thing, I might add, is that I don’t think it’s a race for a Gold Cup winner and if I think about it too hard it makes me feel sick.

Here’s a picture instead; I prefer Degas’ racehorses to the ballerinas, although I can appreciate those too.

Knowing the Aintree crowd, there’ll be both on the course this afternoon.

Degas: pastels on paper, National Gallery of Canada

Dubai World Cup

So You Think?

Later today, out in the desert sand, under the bright lights a bunch of horses will try to win the world’s richest race over one mile and two furlongs.

Good luck to them all. I can’t find a reason not to think So You Think won’t win.

And I’ve got a collection of triple negatives there that would make an editor’s toes curl.

Life taking its toll

By which I mean to say nothing quite escapes the up-turned palm of the gate-keeper as time rolls on. A family and a dog ravage a home, a garden and a car in their own particular way and, if you are busy with it all, you can’t quite keep on top of it at the same time.

That’s more or less what I was thinking about when I sat outside in the garden, an outside space that could pass for a film scene set in a nuclear winter. I was uncomfortable on a wooden chair that is coming up for 6 years old and could pass for vintage, on account of neglect. It’s more or less what I thought when I considered the aspect of the car from the inside of the petrol station earlier; when the woman in front pleaded with the inanimate object that was her bank card to, ‘Please work?’. She then simply announced she had no money in the bank when it didn’t work. The assistant asked could she pay with anything else, and she just said, ‘No’ and left. Someone apologised, it could have been the broke woman or the assistant. In my head, it was me.

Really, it was only a fiver or so, and as I too have no money in the bank, but my card was agreeing to work I should have offered to pay for the items myself. I only thought of that after she had gone, so surprised was I by her frankness when I suspect many of us would have offered at least some form of dissemblance.

When I drove into the petrol station I was thinking perhaps I would fill up the car on account of the impending petrol delivery strikes and then I thought I won’t be driving it by the weekend because it’s going to fail the MOT and I can’t countenance what it might cost to fix it. And I was also holding a thought from another, earlier, conversation. I had asked someone in London if there were queues for fuel there yet, and the reply had come, no there weren’t and who could afford to fill up their tanks these days anyway? With this in mind, and the impending MOT failure (no rear brake light offside, no wing mirror nearside, stone chip in the windscreen and god know what damage to the chassis due to a no-fault collision) I put in twenty-two quids worth of fuel (and twenty-two pence), mainly for the satisfaction of lining up all the twos.

22.22

These used to be my lucky digits, but I don’t believe in luck anymore, so I can’t claim them as my own. Someone else can have them if they like, I won’t mind.

So, yes, life takes its toll on the outside of everything, it takes away the notion of luck and in its place we can frantically replace and renew and paint and restore and fix-up and rub-down and then do it all over and over again another day, another year because that’s how it goes.

Or we can sit on the parched earth on the rickety old-before-its-time chair and read something about life by an 80 year old writer, translated from the Czech, and leave all of it and everything to its own devices.

Peasant Burning Weeds ~ Vincent Van Gogh

In praise of jockeys

I can’t let the Festival week end without noting the general workaday heroism of our jockeys, both jumps and flat. They often come in for a lot of stick (excuse the pun) and if you don’t ride you can have no idea of the physical demands made on their bodies every day, and that’s not including kicks and falls and wasting to make weight.

For my money, these guys are the toughest athletes we have. Early starts, long journeys, seven day weeks on little food – no wonder Andrew Tinkler tweeted this morning that if he’d been lucky enough to win the one million that one of Nicky Henderson’s stable staff did this week on a yard five-timer, Tinkler would be straight off to Heathrow – not riding work the next morning as indeed the lottery winner was (full story here).

Anyway, props to Ruby Walsh and Tony McCoy for yesterday; not just for having the wisdom to preserve the beloved Kauto Star after nine fences jumped, nor indeed the looks like you won’t even be placed ride on Synchronised to lift the Gold Cup. No, massive, massive respect for this brief exchange, redolent with meaning, between the two friends and competitors during the running of the Gold Cup, reported in the Racing Post.

Ruby said: “I was thinking about pulling up when
AP [McCoy] said ‘if I were you I’d be pulling up’.

The rest is history.

From the Mirror: AP with Synchronised ~ what a lovely Sadler's Wells face

On another cockles-of-my-heart note, Paul Nicholls is parading Kauto Star, Big Buck’s and Rock on Ruby through Ditcheat this lunchtime, in that order. Kauto Star in front, where he belongs.