[NWRA]

I use MS Excel, though any spreadsheet software is adequate. It allows me to keep my records neat and tidy, and to make simple P/L calculations; and it makes me feel remarkably sophisticated and business-like.

My columns are: the date; the type of race (i.e., ‘8F / CLASS 6 / A.W’); the name of the horse; the reasons for backing it (which is useful for finding patterns); the stake; then, the result; and comments on the result (if the horse loses, I will give a reason why it may have lost, and if there is anything to learn from it, to avoid in the future).

Whenever I look at my records, I’m embarrassed by some of the bets that I’ve made, and I honestly can’t understand what I was thinking at the time; and this usually prevents any impulse bets on hype horses or any bets on horses which I have a strong doubt about yet I’m willing to bet on them anyway (because I’ve learned that the doubt usually becomes a self-fulfiling prophecy).<br>

[NWRA]

… some truly great replies on here, thanks to all contributors.

(don’t stop if you think of anymore!)<br> <br>

[NWRA]

I think its a very good article: your opinions are clear (and you state them vehemently: you really make the jockeys and their excuses seem pathetic), its articulate and funny (in the right way), and it has momentum (it seems the right length, it has the right pacing). I like the way you’ve started both of your columns with a quote from a comedy too.

By the way, if you don’t want to create a new thread for every article, why don’t you ‘bump’ this thead whenever you write something new? or add a ‘last updated: – – – ‘ sign in your signature? Otherwise I’ll probably forget to check, and I’d like to keep updated.

[NWRA]

It flows well, and proves that you have the skill to write professionally (when you find a subject).

Generally, I think you need to ask yourself after every article: do you want the reader to judge the point(s) your trying to make, or to judge your vocabulary and your knowledge of Greek mythology? Obviously, it should be the former. So, I would concentrate on that (i.e., making interesting points), and not trying to be the next Nabokov.

I would practice writing a weekly or twice-weekly column, which responds to recent events in an original way (based on the format of the columns in The RP)? because the kind of article that you’re written (and which Jackane24 used to write) is an oddity – what is it? I’ve never seen The RP carry a general piece like that?

Also, it would be good practice; could you write about Winston’s fall from grace, etc, without feeling that you’re repeating what has already been said by everyone else?

Finally, I wouldn’t try to be funny, unless a punchline naturally suggests itself. There are few things more annoying than forced humour (its what makes nearly every music magazine so unreadable); as you say, ‘it needs to be done well or not at all’ (with that kind of awareness, you should be fine).<br>

[NWRA]

I refused to get my girlfriend a Valentine’s Day present as, by doing so, I would have reduced our profound, emotionally and intellectually-satisfying relationship to a picture of Mills And Boon vulgarity, a shallow prop which needs to be supported by a forced exchange of material goods (with love hearts on them).

Also, I’m a plebeian and I don’t have a job.

Also, I don’t have a girlfriend (but I do watch a woman’s window at night). <br>

[NWRA]

Quote: from dave 22 on 7:23 pm on Feb. 8, 2007[br]Noble request will not be seen again this season. has cracked a bone. not happy, was my e/w selection in the champ!

Speaking of Noble Request – does anyone know what happened to Wellbeing, the horse that beat him impressively at Aintree in his last race (and is also trained by P. Hobbs)? I expected him to be a Champion Hurdle contender this year… I can’t remember reading about him being injured or anything.

[NWRA]

This is the article (I’ve nicked it from elsewhere, I didn’t type it myself):

It is a moment probably understood by ageing boxers past their prime. Deep into a bruising battle in which they have been battered round the ring and horribly hurt by some youngster who would not have laid a glove on them in their glory days, the bell rings for the tenth round. But this time the old warrior does not rise from his stool. Though his every instinct is to go on, the cumulative effect of countless thousands of blows has taken its toll. It is not the body that is failing to answer the summons of the bell-it is something in the soul that tells him not only is this fight lost, but all fights.

Many jump jockeys have a similar meeting with their own truth. It comes unexpectedly and unlooked for. That morning when they wake to find three bad gaff rides and, with an extraordinary mix of pure funk and profound relief, admit to themselves: "God,I have had enough. I can’t do this anymore".

On an infinitely lower and less noble plane, your Tuesday columnist has been absent these four weeks as a result of a long process that amounted to an arrival at the bleak understanding that the game was up. It wasn’t the prognosis of being dead in a year or so that did it, or the gloriously exact picture of the agonies<br>in which I would depart, literally ridding myself of seven of the body’s eight pints of blood in about the same time as they take to run the Champion Hurdle.

Somewhere inside me the happy, heavy drinker of more than three decades was already dead. I was no longer the master of my old friend alcohol-I had become its serf. Those of us lucky to have loyal employers with the requisite insurance can take ourselves off to places where, over 28 days, you spend a vast sum of money, eat awful food, work morning, noon and evening, seven days a week, and learn what "tough love" really means from staff who have done all the mad and bad things you have, and have the merciless ability to skewer your inner torments with the metronome, repetitive accuracy of a darts champion thudding into treble twenty.

Of course you fight the humiliations, the intrusions and the raw lumps of emotion that pile up like so much<br>offal in an abattoir. And the more you fight, the more painful it gets and the more angry you become. Until suddenly, you come to the boxer’s moment and that bell rings out unheeded and unanswered. ‘Surrender to win’ is one of the buzz phrases, and once you wave the white flag it gets easier. They break you into very small pieces and then hand you a very small tube of mental and moral glue with which to stick yourself back together. Don’t ask me whether it will work, as I am now in ‘one day at a time mode’. All I can tell you is that after one month without a drink, there are just over 100 bottles of wine out there that have not met the nemesis of my corkscrew.

And in among the horror stories from my fellow travellers that reduced me to pints of tears and are literally unprintable in any paper in the land, oceans of hilarity and humour from the three wings of this great hospital-dubbed Addicts (drink and drugs), Saddos (psychiatric problems) and Twiglets (eating disorders). The van taking the snorters off to Cocaine Anonymous was the ‘Snowmobile’, while there was always competition among the pill-poppers and smackheads for the best seats in the ‘Druggy Buggy’.

After a lengthy meeting of the United Nations Security Council, they allowed me a daily copy of the Racing Post on the condition it was not waved under the noses of any compulsive gamblers. However, I wasn’t permitted to read it until after five and sadly my bookie wouldn’t let me place bets after racing, a la Dorothy Paget, or I could have paid for the month myself.

While this newly recovering alcoholic is not promising never to have another drink, I do solemnly swear not to become a bore about it and continue to buy my round without delivering a homily on hooch and handing you a copy of War Cry. In all honesty, I want the old me back and, while he wasn’t much, he was a sight better than the sad travesty of recent years. It is not too late properly to love my astonishingly supportive children and friends again, and to enjoy gently making amends to them all.

I have been warned, however, to watch out for ‘cross addiction’, whereby you switch alcohol energies into some fresh obsession. Luckily, while inside, I met only three women I want to marry. Nothing to worry about there then.

– – – – –

I’ve always liked Alastair’s column; him, and Peter Thomas, usually have insightful opinions, and justify them articulately and wittily. True, I’ve never been fond of Alastair when he pretends to be self-depreciating (anyone who uses such ostentatious, grand language is hardly lacking in confidence), but now his spirit is genuinely destroyed, I’ll forgive him for that. I wish him well…

[NWRA]

This is the article (I’ve nicked it from elsewhere, I didn’t type it myself):

It is a moment probably understood by ageing boxers past their prime. Deep into a bruising battle in which they have been battered round the ring and horribly hurt by some youngster who would not have laid a glove on them in their glory days, the bell rings for the tenth round. But this time the old warrior does not rise from his stool. Though his every instinct is to go on, the cumulative effect of countless thousands of blows has taken its toll. It is not the body that is failing to answer the summons of the bell-it is something in the soul that tells him not only is this fight lost, but all fights.

Many jump jockeys have a similar meeting with their own truth. It comes unexpectedly and unlooked for. That morning when they wake to find three bad gaff rides and, with an extraordinary mix of pure funk and profound relief, admit to themselves: "God,I have had enough. I can’t do this anymore".

On an infinitely lower and less noble plane, your Tuesday columnist has been absent these four weeks as a result of a long process that amounted to an arrival at the bleak understanding that the game was up. It wasn’t the prognosis of being dead in a year or so that did it, or the gloriously exact picture of the agonies<br>in which I would depart, literally ridding myself of seven of the body’s eight pints of blood in about the same time as they take to run the Champion Hurdle.

Somewhere inside me the happy, heavy drinker of more than three decades was already dead. I was no longer the master of my old friend alcohol-I had become its serf. Those of us lucky to have loyal employers with the requisite insurance can take ourselves off to places where, over 28 days, you spend a vast sum of money, eat awful food, work morning, noon and evening, seven days a week, and learn what "tough love" really means from staff who have done all the mad and bad things you have, and have the merciless ability to skewer your inner torments with the metronome, repetitive accuracy of a darts champion thudding into treble twenty.

Of course you fight the humiliations, the intrusions and the raw lumps of emotion that pile up like so much<br>offal in an abattoir. And the more you fight, the more painful it gets and the more angry you become. Until suddenly, you come to the boxer’s moment and that bell rings out unheeded and unanswered. ‘Surrender to win’ is one of the buzz phrases, and once you wave the white flag it gets easier. They break you into very small pieces and then hand you a very small tube of mental and moral glue with which to stick yourself back together. Don’t ask me whether it will work, as I am now in ‘one day at a time mode’. All I can tell you is that after one month without a drink, there are just over 100 bottles of wine out there that have not met the nemesis of my corkscrew.

And in among the horror stories from my fellow travellers that reduced me to pints of tears and are literally unprintable in any paper in the land, oceans of hilarity and humour from the three wings of this great hospital-dubbed Addicts (drink and drugs), Saddos (psychiatric problems) and Twiglets (eating disorders). The van taking the snorters off to Cocaine Anonymous was the ‘Snowmobile’, while there was always competition among the pill-poppers and smackheads for the best seats in the ‘Druggy Buggy’.

After a lengthy meeting of the United Nations Security Council, they allowed me a daily copy of the Racing Post on the condition it was not waved under the noses of any compulsive gamblers. However, I wasn’t permitted to read it until after five and sadly my bookie wouldn’t let me place bets after racing, a la Dorothy Paget, or I could have paid for the month myself.

While this newly recovering alcoholic is not promising never to have another drink, I do solemnly swear not to become a bore about it and continue to buy my round without delivering a homily on hooch and handing you a copy of War Cry. In all honesty, I want the old me back and, while he wasn’t much, he was a sight better than the sad travesty of recent years. It is not too late properly to love my astonishingly supportive children and friends again, and to enjoy gently making amends to them all.

I have been warned, however, to watch out for ‘cross addiction’, whereby you switch alcohol energies into some fresh obsession. Luckily, while inside, I met only three women I want to marry. Nothing to worry about there then.

– – – – –

I’ve always liked Alastair’s column; him, and Peter Thomas, usually have insightful opinions, and justify them articulately and wittily. True, I’ve never been fond of Alastair when he pretends to be self-depreciating (anyone who uses such ostentatious, grand language is hardly lacking in confidence), but now his spirit is genuinely destroyed, I’ll forgive him for that. I wish him well…

[NWRA]

If you look in the dictionary for the definition of ‘gentle comfort television, with nice scenery, shown exclusively on Sunday evenings’ you will see that there is no entry.  

However, if there was, Rough Diamond would be listed with such esteemed company as Heartbeat and Ballykissangel; though the footage of horses (even when its disturbingly eroticised) raises the former above the others in my view.

Also, the horse who plays the eponymous beast should get an acting award. I was moved by his portrayal of an insane loner, in the grand tradition of Travis Bickle and Hitler (in Downfall). Neigh!<br>

[NWRA]

<br>How did you get into racing? <br>Because my Dad is a follower of the sport, and a gambler. Most Saturdays in The Working Men’s Club centred on watching the Channel 4 coverage (and still do), and there were regular trips to York and Ripon and Beverly races (and there still are), at an impressionable young age.

Why? <br>I like horses – they’re excellent. Also, I’m still hopeful that I can make a profit from gambling.

Are you from a racing family/background? <br>Only in the sense of betting on them; otherwise, no, and that is another one of the reasons why I’m so fond of racing (particularly attending the races) – seeing horses in the flesh is still a novelty.

Who do you go racing with ? groups? on your own?<br>None of my friends are interested, so I attend the races with my parents (and their friends). I’m even off to Paris, to watch the Arc, with them (I’m in my early twenties, and they’re both fifty-something); true, they’re more of a laugh than most of my friends, but it would be nice if I could go with someone my own age, and feel a little less tragic…<br>

[NWRA]

For me, Thirteen Against The Bank by Norman Leigh remains the benchmark for gambling books (with a narrative).

The story is interesting (a winning roulette system; which actually works if you have the stamina), and the writing is superb: the dry humour, the characterisation of each member of the team (and the way that gambling effects the characters), the depictions of the highs and lows of gambling, the fluorescent gloom of casinos, and the mental stresses, etc. And, in a vague way, it benefits from being set in the 1960s, and the fact (rumour?) that the narrater died as a poor alcoholic.

I recommend it, even if (like me) you have little interest in casino gambling.<br>

[NWRA]

<br>I dislike the latest Weightwatchers advert (the video diary one, with a bloke talking about his wife), where the message seems to be: Mums – lost weight or your family will stop loving you.

I suppose, like all of the diet industry, its preying on women’s insecurity, but it seems to be in even worse taste than usual.

I work in a factory, for the minimum wage (its either that or the dole), and many of my fellow workers, when not grunting and growling, like to swear. I dislike swearing, particularly sexual swearwords.  I hate the word ‘títs’; it hardly suggests the voluptuousness of the female form, more something you would find in a rusty fishing box. And ‘****’. A caveman ‘*****’ – he hits a cavewoman over the head, drags her to his lair, and they ‘****’. It hardly suggests the epic opera of lovemaking.  This kind of vocabulary doesn’t try to describe things, rather it tries to destroy them, stamp on them, squeeze the joy out of them, until they’re flat, ugly and aggressive. I don’t even like it when people refer to going out and socialising as ‘getting p**s
ed!’… what a dreary World…

And I don’t like George Orwell. I think he’s a snob (i.e., The Road To Wigan Pier, and the way he ‘studies’ the workingclass – studies them, as if they’re newly discovered wildlife – and seems to think that the workingclass and The North are diametrically opposed to the middleclass and The South)<br>

[NWRA]

What is the difference between racists and racist Australians? and isn’t the way you distinguish between the two a bit, um, racist?

I’m glad you mentioned The Star. It’s always bothered me to think that the writers of the newspaper are (presumably) educated and from ‘decent’ backgrounds. However, the newspaper is aimed at proles, so they make their writing as crude, idiotic and prejudiced as possible; and rather than cover news, prefer to fill the paper with jokes and porn and pictures of celebrities outside. The writers must have a very low opinion of their readers, and the thicko class they belong to.

This is a selfish choice, but I hate my boss – she is one of those bosses without any intelligence or spark of wit or imagination, and has only reached her position by having an obstinate obedience to rules and procedures, taking the job disproportionately seriously, and slowly ascending the career ladder in a clinical and efficient way; and her dour, rigid face seemingly never changes, never expresses any feeling other than resentment, probably not even at the point of orgasm. Dreadful.

(I’m off to vomit my spleen up).<br>

[NWRA]

I’m fascinated by those plucky underdogs, the Des Mottes gang (Nippy, Oracle, and Mambo Des Mottes). Does anyone know what ‘Des Mottes’ means; or, more accurately, the question should probably be, can anyone find out? because I’ve tried searching on Google, etc, but, alas, the mystery remains unsolved

[NWRA]

I’m surprised that ‘Simon From Leeds’ (the bloke who kept on backing losers at last season’s Cheltenham Festival, and was constantly interviewed/laughed at by the team) doesn’t have his own weekly slot on The Morning Line.

It could be brilliant. Every Saturday, Derek cheekily asks Simon whether he has managed to back a winner since last week, already suspecting the answer. Simon tells Derek his latest hilarious (probably invented) tale of woe: he nearly backed a winner, but… (the horse fell at the final fence / he wrote the wrong name on the slip, etc). The jolly trombone music which is used on Last Of The Summer Wine to suggest mild senility could play in the background.

Alright, you’d have to ignore another of the day’s main races, and it would lower the tone even further (almost below the spectrum of idiocy), but who cares.<br>

[NWRA]

Are you one of those folk who think that, if you keep talking about how great you supposedly think you are, everyone will find your sheer chutzpah is charming and hilarious? A bit like that twunt Jonathon Ross when he calls himself ‘handsome’ every few nanoseconds and the audience clap like sea lions?

I’ve never ‘got’ that humour.

…and well done to the winners of the vote.<br>

[NWRA]

I use a few systems, which aren’t really systems but more ways of rationalizing the instinctive keenness that I’ve always had for backing ‘types’ of horses; and identifying whether a horse definitely belongs to a type or not.

I use level stakes, and gamble around once a fortnight (generally on short priced favourites, i.e., my last bet was on Peruvian Prince on Friday and he had everything that I look for in one of the systems).<br>  

(Edited by NWRA at 4:23 pm on Dec. 17, 2006)

[Author]

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