I've been up since 6am, doing various racing/betting-related things, and one of those things was looking at a race at Lingfield Park tomorrow.
It occurred to me that, the last time I went Jump racing there, Dick Francis was in the bar.
This must have been circa 1986 - I remember getting the train from Victoria to Lingfield, walking down a leafy path that took me to the racecourse, a very nice imo quiet little cafe style building behind the Stand which served IIRC prawn and smoked salmon sandwiches which I washed down with a Rombouts filter coffee.
As for the racing, my main memory is of it being reliably Heavy ground, getting 4/1 Berlin who won a novices' hurdle in style, walking down to the last fence, which in those days, had an open ditch alongside a plain fence much as Sandown Park still has to this day, and being impressed with the natural hedge wings on the fences (Hexham still has those and one or two fences in the back straight at Chepstow), I recall.
I always quite liked stuff like that.
On another subject, I may have erred in commenting on the legendary Gigilo "Daily Picks" thread.
Possibly, it was, as Danny suggested, "poor form" on my part.
I have grown to respect as well as like Danny here - I regard Daniel as a calming peacemaker overall within these Halls of racing and betting debate - he seldom criticises so, when he does, I sit up and take notice.
I won't be posting on that thread again in a hurry.
In all conscience, however, I do stand by what I said on it.
Publications like racing papers are often rightly chastised for having an army of tipsters and, when one invariably comes up with a winner, trumpeting it in a "blurb" ("We got the winner!" - err, yeah right, from about a dozen stabs at it).
Gigilo isn't an army of tipsters, he's one man, but he sure puts up an army of horses.
If you do that, of course you will have winners, and sometimes they will be clustered together on one card, and you sometimes have the 1-2, or even 1-2-3, in a race among them.
But it doesn't really mean anything if an accountant ran it all through the numerical meatgrinder and it all added up to a net annual loss.
And the facile "the winners are in there among all the tips, you just have to sort the wheat from the chaff" rejoinder is equally meaningless.
There is a lot of talk on social media at the moment about how racing media and other commercial tipsters should all produce a P/L.
Those rules don't apply on racing and betting forums, but I'd say the instant you start bragging about success, talking about accounts that should be closed, and wheeling out photos of Cubans with wheelbarrows full of cash, you invite that sort of accounting scrutiny.
So while I'm not fan of the "haters," I can see where some of the criticism stems from.
If you imply your tips are long-term profitable, sooner or later someone may challenge you to publish the numbers to prove it.
All of these tests could be applied to me, of course, I put up bets and the OTT bragging of my in the third-person-referenced persona YFUSA is my trademark.
But anyone with more than one functioning brain cell can tell I'm having a tongue-in-cheek laugh and tbh though I cba to do it myself, if anyone trawled back and worked it out, I'd be faintly amazed if I wasn't bombs in front to a level stake.
I don't actually put up that many bets and since spring, just off the top of my head, I've put up winners at 16/1, 18/1, 40/1, 45/1, 25/1, 40/1 and had a 5,566/1 Trifecta (a bet I've only recommended about four times) up, ffs, to put the tin lid on it.
How in the name of Walsworth's shirt tucked into his underpants can I behind after all that?
But it's only a game, so many take it and themselves too seriously - I simply like to show it's possible to both keep your head above water and nick a few quid, while actually retaining a sense of humour along the way.
Right, typing this latest monologue has taken me through to well gone seven and has set me up for the day.
Anything else before I post this?
Oh, yeah - this is a blog/diary thread.
It's about ME.
If you're not interested in ME, don't read it.
And if you want to chat shit about life, the universe and anything else, do me a favour and go do it some place else.
I'll be issuing "Get off my f *****g Blog/Diary" thread violation tickets as I see fit going forwards.
Happy Silver Cup (that's SGB to the stuck-in-the-past brigade) Day, everyone!
