TIME’S ARROW

Heavy ground at Salisbury in October: it’s not right somehow. Salisbury is a summer track. Seeing the cathedral shivering and partly obscured by a mizzle looks like a climate-change warning. But there it is, what else can we expect now the precious last months of summer have slipped beneath the horizon?

Already this week has contained elements of the unexpected for your correspondent, who, to be frank, has little to correspond with you about. Unless you count an excursion to Basingstoke town centre on Monday, the washing machine packing up and the car battery giving out, which I am not sure we should. Why is it we never get a winner when we need it most?

Basingstoke may not be as quintessentially English as Salisbury; however, it has a better shopping centre and an excellent library – being the purpose of visit. It also has a Chinese restaurant that offers an all-you-can-eat lunchtime buffet for £6.90. I have always thought this a dangerous way to conduct business – about as inappropriate as the woman that throws open her dressing gown and dares a suitor to ‘Take me – do what you will with me daarling!’ It can be asking for trouble. As for me, I have to say I am more likely to wreak havoc at the buffet than in the boudoir these days, but unlike some of my fellow diners, I may have heaped two meals on my plate but did consume it all. Strangely, when it comes to wastage, it seems the overweight eaters are the worse culprits.

Suitably refuelled for the rest of the week, I finished the shopping and called into Ladbrokes on the way to the multi-storey. Not having an interest in the day’s racing (in truth I was not even too sure what was running – a brief look at the cards the night before told me all I needed to know), I don’t quite know why I even bothered – habit I suppose, something bookmakers rely on to keep the wheels of their businesses turning. I arrived at one of racing’s coalfaces in time to see some cardboard horses running at a virtual track. Some of those horses need looking at – they have terrible actions – I feel they run too often. Four horses went over the line together although none were particularly vigorously ridden, making me assume there was more than one non-trier involved in the finish.

There was also a race at Bath taking place. Richard Hughes was on the favourite and seemed a long way back when they turned for home. He conjured a run out of the horse and loomed large on the outside a furlong out, looking sure to win only to be run out of it close home. There was some muttering from the handful of punters in the shop. One took revenge on his ticket, ripping it to shreds, which was probably an expensive piece of vandalism. He then started to swear at the screen, directing his comments at Hughsie. I say started to swear because the word of choice started with an f…, but he retracted it as if suddenly reminded he was inside a monastery. It strikes me a suppressed swear word, indicating it is not part of the speaker’s normal vocabulary, carries more weight than the one that is spoken habitually. The man had clearly backed the Hughes-ridden favourite and felt aggrieved – but not so aggrieved that it stopped him scribbling a replacement selection on another slip.

My comrades-at-arms were not the sort you would invite to a dinner-party. There was what I took to be a lady (I can’t be sure though) sitting on a stool clutching a betting slip as if it were a doctor’s prescription. Her mobile went off and she jabbering into it without taking her eyes off the bank of screens. There was the obligatory machine-player, someone that had adopted the thing judging by his desperate desire to feed it. He was pressing buttons and holding symbols at lightning speed, seemingly knowing what he was doing, making me wonder whether he should put this knowledge to better use and pursue a career in IT.

There was someone fighting sleep in a corner as two would-be punters finalised selections for the next race from somewhere other than Bath.

There was what I took to be the manageress overseeing everything from her perch by what used to be a bandit screen. In my day, a betting office manager had to settle bets and spent most of his time doing just that – facing a mountain of slips with an ever-growing headache. These days I presume some machine made in China completes the task by day and sorts out the employee roster and wages by night.

If the sparse and motley collection of customers in Basingstoke is anything to go by, I doubt the volume of bets in betting offices comes close to what they once were. In many ways this is strange. Cluttered with technology, punters in today’s clinical shops – fitted-out like Vodafone units – expect to watch the action and can back and see events from all over the world; whereas, back in the day, they listened to commentaries from a crackly loudspeaker the size of an old Bush radio. Yet the betting offices of today seem to harbour customers that look as if they have mistaken the place for a soup kitchen. Surely this means something is wrong somewhere.

It would appear John McCririck is a man attempting to wind back the clock. Embittered by his dismissal from Channel 4 Racing, his court case against his former employers is in progress. John is unwisely taking on the big battalions in the hope of exposing ageism. Sorry if this is news John, but employers are not forming an orderly queue to take on seventy-three-year-old writers/presenters – or people of that age to do anything. In an attempt to make ends meet, I know of a reliable and fit sixty-year-old that could not get a job with a newsagent delivering the morning papers in our village. To quote Bruce Hornsby, that’s The Way It Is. Racing has served John well and vice versa, but sometimes you have to move on in life rather than remain in a time warp.

That said, Channel 4 has rather missed a trick with its racing coverage. I suppose it has updated its approach to the sport somewhat, but it still squanders a great deal of valuable air time, particularly when subjecting us to its presenters’ tips on the Morning Line – a program that seems to contain more guffaws and in-jokes than a gentleman’s club for displaced Tories.

Fifty minutes of scheduling on a Saturday morning could surely contain better content than a bunch of presenters looking as if they are still recovering from their previous evening’s exertions at the bar. A magazine-styled program aimed at racing fans that informs rather than second-guesses should replace endless selections from a team that belie their own tipping abilities.

With two exceptions they are presenters not tipsters. Shifting emphasis away from tipping would be preferable to confusing viewers with a raft of unlikely selections for the hardest handicaps of the day. The newspapers are full of those after all!

Channel Four get a chance to present some quality television this weekend as they cover the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe.

Latest news from France means Leading Light will join what looks like a top class line-up on Sunday for the big event. There was rain in Paris on Monday and more is forecast on Friday, meaning Good to Soft ground is almost certainly the likely surface. Is France the wettest place on Earth?

Rain or no rain, France does stage horse racing rather well and at an affordable rate. The weekend cards at Longchamp are testament to that.

Of course, we know a thing or two about the sport – Royal Ascot being our showpiece meeting for the year. But then, as with Channel Four’s racing coverage, generally we dumb down rather than concentrate on the quality Group racing provides. Cue the old argument about there being too much racing and it being staged for the benefit of bookmakers.

Maybe it is time someone this side of the Channel realised the perceived stereotype of racing fans is not wholly correct.