PASS IT ON
Churchill won and I was there to watch it - Churchill, the winner of the 2,000 Guineas at Newmarket. I was there as a 70th birthday treat, courtesy of young Jack, who ferried me to the course last Saturday. I sold my car – near new - to Jack last summer, having had to give up driving after more than 50 years. Very occasionally (twice in fact) I have what’s known as a ventricular fibrillation, where the heart goes haywire. I faint and my de-fib device, like a little portable radio implanted under my left shoulder blade, kicks in and 24 seconds later I wake, on the floor, but otherwise feeling none the worse. This is not what you want to happen overtaking on the M11, and though there was annoyance on having to sell a still gleaming (red) car, the de-fib device saved my life. I know I’m out for 24 seconds because the implant, like an earthquake detector, registers these things. After the first time I conked out I walked into the hospital and said to David, the guy who checks these things, ‘We’re looking at April 6th or 7th, whichever was the Thursday, about 6.30 in the evening.’ He wires me up to the monitor, which spills out a kind of ticker tape, announcing from behind me, ‘6.34, April 6th.’ It’s that accurate. You read of young footballers collapsing on the pitch with VR and related conditions – undiagnosed. Unless they get rapid attention, they can be gone in 5 minutes: with VR the oxygen’s not getting round to the brain. I’m protected with my (not so little) device. I’m probably not going to die that way - it’s different from a heart attack - and am able to say, cheerfully, that if that’s the way you die I can live with it. You have a few seconds where you think ‘that’s odd,’ and then blackout. My parents’ generation would have called it ‘a funny do,’ and regarded it - as with most heart conditions then - as the beginning of the end, if not the end itself. The cardiologist who installed my de-fib said to me: ‘This will prevent your having a sudden death,’ and I said, ‘Oh, I’d quite like a sudden death.’ ‘We can arrange that when the time comes,’ he said, slightly mysteriously, cutting a slice in my anaesthetised flesh above my heart.
Jack – a further generation on from me (and who once cycled from John O’Groats to Land’s End) - grimaces a bit when I tell him these tales, as I enjoy doing. He’s thirty one, the son of my best and most combative friend, mentioned in the previous essay. Jack loves it when his father and me slag one another off - and any tales, indeed, about his father before he was born (which I censor loyally, parting the curtain teasingly). I’ve known Jack since he was a week old, and indeed was present when he ‘sat up’ for the first time; his mother having left me with him sitting on the floor. I removed my hand, which was holding him up, not knowing he was previously incapable of managing that unaided. He now works as a Civil Servant in Downing Street (due to my helping hands I like to think) and is now about to get married. His fiancée, Jacqui, also a Civil Servant (they met across a desk) had brought a tasty picnic lunch to the races with us (I don’t think Jack had a part in it, though I never checked), with ingredients my mother would never have considered – coriander, pomegranate seeds etc. I first came to Newmarket with my mum, Elsie – who was always game for a trip out - in 1972. We had to eat, as last Saturday (cold) in the car. It was pouring it down 45 years ago. High Top beat Roberto, the subsequent Derby winner, a win we dimly glimpsed through driving rain. Roberto would later lower the sails of the unbeaten Brigadier Gerard at York, and the first Guineas I attended (the year before High Top/Roberto’s) saw the third favourite, Brigadier Gerard, coming up the stands rails to beat the hotshots Mill Reef and My Swallow, who were battling one another down the centre of the course. ‘It was the greatest Guineas of the second half of the Twentieth Century,’ I say to the guy who parks his car next to us, a fanatic - on his own: you get them at the races - and very happy to chat as the wind whistles round us, lunch waiting temptingly in the car. But we remain for a good twenty minutes discussing, among other things, just how great Frankel was – me suggesting he’d been cotton wool-ed a bit by his trainer in not being sent to race abroad, and not attempting (as that other great miler Brigadier Gerard) the Derby distance of a mile and a half. I’m playing devil’s advocate really – Frankel’s performance in the one mile Queen Anne, the opening race at Ascot during his four year old career, is the greatest I have ever seen on a racecourse. Race goers that day – it was the opening race on the card - were still staggering out into the stands from hospitality lunches. I knew what I was watching while it was happening and the gap kept opening up (and up) from the first rate Aidan O’Brien Excelebration in second place (the winner of four or five Group Ones races in his own right). Rather unusually I started texting my (Irish) racing pal, John, to say ’fucking hell’ or equivalent before the race was over. I seemed to see it (I was watching on television) in slow motion.
Much boozing inside the race course: a beer fest, or whatever the urine coloured liquid in plastic cups is. But a pleasant atmosphere, if busier and more corporate than in my day. Lots of groups of lads (which I like) sharp suited and coiffed – X Factor, Only Way is Essex. Not many girls, dressed like cockatoos. One very handsome youth, with a girl on his arm (unusually – it’s mainly single sex groupings) grins on seeing me, as if in recognition, and continues smiling as I pass by. All is perhaps explained a little later when a middle aged woman, very politely, also peering interestedly at me, asks: ‘Are you off “Countdown?”’ I’m not, I say, ‘though I did know Richard Whiteley,’ as if to compensate for her disappointment. And well enough, indeed, to have gone to the races with him a couple of times, though I don’t say this. Somebody has mentioned my resemblance to whoever the handsome buck is on ‘Countdown’ before, and I need to check it out - if I can overcome an aversion to brightly coloured, over lit, jolly daytime telly.
The winds from the Urals have died down a bit; Jacqui has tried out the on course bookies a couple of times (unsuccessfully) and we follow an old ritual of mine, going down to the pre-parade ring, thereby missing the previous race to the Guineas (though you can see most things on the big screens these days). I love the pre parade ring. It’s quiet: the colts parade with their numbers on, and you have to pick them out. Number 3 is Churchill – not particularly impressive, I think, though lithe, on his toes (the Frankel sired Eminent is paddock pick), and I ramble on to Jack about breeding. Churchill is by Galileo out of a fast Storm Cat mare. Galileo is possibly an even greater sire than his dad, Sadler’s Wells, or granddad. Northern Dancer. It’s this side of the game that interests me rather than ten pound accumulator bets and the rest. Churchill wins, cleverly, to not an enormous amount of enthusiasm from the crowd. He’s short odds, and his team are winning everything at the moment – it’s Aidan’s eighth Guineas winner. The following day he will also train the winner of the 1,000 Guineas (the fillies’ equivalent) with another Galileo, and also take the second spot –with yet another Galileo. I talk about the sire’s breeding and racing record; Jack is in, as they say, ‘listening mode.’ It was his idea to go to the races. Years ago I gave him a framed print of those jockey cigarette cards you used to get before smoking became miserable. I also happened to have the equivalent loose cards, a full set, and little Jack liked matching them. It sparked something. After I’ve gone he will inherit my Vanity Fair jockey prints, worth a bob or two, but I hope a reminder of me. ‘Pass it on’ as Hector in ‘The History Boys’ says.
It was my dad engendered my interest in horse racing – I describe it in my previous batch of essays (Festivals and Genealogy). I remember a Christmas card arriving from a bookmaker’s, William Hill, with a photograph of the mighty Ribot (one of the very best post war colts, unbeaten 14 tines at the highest level). That probably hooked me back in 1956. I was 9. How?
We get back to London, leaving before the last race to avoid the traffic. Jack and Jacqui show me round their newly purchased flat and we have a – modest- drink in the garden – he’s driving me back to where I’m staying. What’s thrilled me about the day is the energy I’ve felt throughout the day. Three years ago I couldn’t have contemplated going to the races: getting there, crowds, stairways up to the grandstand. I never thought I’d have another day at the Races. And just have. My first visit to a racecourse was with Jack’s father: we sneaked off from Cambridge to see the Derby at Epsom. Royal Palace (by Ballymoss out of Crystal Palace) won from Ribocco (by Ribot out of Libra). Pass it on.
Churchill won and I was there to watch it - Churchill, the winner of the 2,000 Guineas at Newmarket. I was there as a 70th birthday treat, courtesy of young Jack, who ferried me to the course last Saturday. I sold my car – near new - to Jack last summer, having had to give up driving after more than 50 years. Very occasionally (twice in fact) I have what’s known as a ventricular fibrillation, where the heart goes haywire. I faint and my de-fib device, like a little portable radio implanted under my left shoulder blade, kicks in and 24 seconds later I wake, on the floor, but otherwise feeling none the worse. This is not what you want to happen overtaking on the M11, and though there was annoyance on having to sell a still gleaming (red) car, the de-fib device saved my life. I know I’m out for 24 seconds because the implant, like an earthquake detector, registers these things. After the first time I conked out I walked into the hospital and said to David, the guy who checks these things, ‘We’re looking at April 6th or 7th, whichever was the Thursday, about 6.30 in the evening.’ He wires me up to the monitor, which spills out a kind of ticker tape, announcing from behind me, ‘6.34, April 6th.’ It’s that accurate. You read of young footballers collapsing on the pitch with VR and related conditions – undiagnosed. Unless they get rapid attention, they can be gone in 5 minutes: with VR the oxygen’s not getting round to the brain. I’m protected with my (not so little) device. I’m probably not going to die that way - it’s different from a heart attack - and am able to say, cheerfully, that if that’s the way you die I can live with it. You have a few seconds where you think ‘that’s odd,’ and then blackout. My parents’ generation would have called it ‘a funny do,’ and regarded it - as with most heart conditions then - as the beginning of the end, if not the end itself. The cardiologist who installed my de-fib said to me: ‘This will prevent your having a sudden death,’ and I said, ‘Oh, I’d quite like a sudden death.’ ‘We can arrange that when the time comes,’ he said, slightly mysteriously, cutting a slice in my anaesthetised flesh above my heart.
Jack – a further generation on from me (and who once cycled from John O’Groats to Land’s End) - grimaces a bit when I tell him these tales, as I enjoy doing. He’s thirty one, the son of my best and most combative friend, mentioned in the previous essay. Jack loves it when his father and me slag one another off - and any tales, indeed, about his father before he was born (which I censor loyally, parting the curtain teasingly). I’ve known Jack since he was a week old, and indeed was present when he ‘sat up’ for the first time; his mother having left me with him sitting on the floor. I removed my hand, which was holding him up, not knowing he was previously incapable of managing that unaided. He now works as a Civil Servant in Downing Street (due to my helping hands I like to think) and is now about to get married. His fiancée, Jacqui, also a Civil Servant (they met across a desk) had brought a tasty picnic lunch to the races with us (I don’t think Jack had a part in it, though I never checked), with ingredients my mother would never have considered – coriander, pomegranate seeds etc. I first came to Newmarket with my mum, Elsie – who was always game for a trip out - in 1972. We had to eat, as last Saturday (cold) in the car. It was pouring it down 45 years ago. High Top beat Roberto, the subsequent Derby winner, a win we dimly glimpsed through driving rain. Roberto would later lower the sails of the unbeaten Brigadier Gerard at York, and the first Guineas I attended (the year before High Top/Roberto’s) saw the third favourite, Brigadier Gerard, coming up the stands rails to beat the hotshots Mill Reef and My Swallow, who were battling one another down the centre of the course. ‘It was the greatest Guineas of the second half of the Twentieth Century,’ I say to the guy who parks his car next to us, a fanatic - on his own: you get them at the races - and very happy to chat as the wind whistles round us, lunch waiting temptingly in the car. But we remain for a good twenty minutes discussing, among other things, just how great Frankel was – me suggesting he’d been cotton wool-ed a bit by his trainer in not being sent to race abroad, and not attempting (as that other great miler Brigadier Gerard) the Derby distance of a mile and a half. I’m playing devil’s advocate really – Frankel’s performance in the one mile Queen Anne, the opening race at Ascot during his four year old career, is the greatest I have ever seen on a racecourse. Race goers that day – it was the opening race on the card - were still staggering out into the stands from hospitality lunches. I knew what I was watching while it was happening and the gap kept opening up (and up) from the first rate Aidan O’Brien Excelebration in second place (the winner of four or five Group Ones races in his own right). Rather unusually I started texting my (Irish) racing pal, John, to say ’fucking hell’ or equivalent before the race was over. I seemed to see it (I was watching on television) in slow motion.
Much boozing inside the race course: a beer fest, or whatever the urine coloured liquid in plastic cups is. But a pleasant atmosphere, if busier and more corporate than in my day. Lots of groups of lads (which I like) sharp suited and coiffed – X Factor, Only Way is Essex. Not many girls, dressed like cockatoos. One very handsome youth, with a girl on his arm (unusually – it’s mainly single sex groupings) grins on seeing me, as if in recognition, and continues smiling as I pass by. All is perhaps explained a little later when a middle aged woman, very politely, also peering interestedly at me, asks: ‘Are you off “Countdown?”’ I’m not, I say, ‘though I did know Richard Whiteley,’ as if to compensate for her disappointment. And well enough, indeed, to have gone to the races with him a couple of times, though I don’t say this. Somebody has mentioned my resemblance to whoever the handsome buck is on ‘Countdown’ before, and I need to check it out - if I can overcome an aversion to brightly coloured, over lit, jolly daytime telly.
The winds from the Urals have died down a bit; Jacqui has tried out the on course bookies a couple of times (unsuccessfully) and we follow an old ritual of mine, going down to the pre-parade ring, thereby missing the previous race to the Guineas (though you can see most things on the big screens these days). I love the pre parade ring. It’s quiet: the colts parade with their numbers on, and you have to pick them out. Number 3 is Churchill – not particularly impressive, I think, though lithe, on his toes (the Frankel sired Eminent is paddock pick), and I ramble on to Jack about breeding. Churchill is by Galileo out of a fast Storm Cat mare. Galileo is possibly an even greater sire than his dad, Sadler’s Wells, or granddad. Northern Dancer. It’s this side of the game that interests me rather than ten pound accumulator bets and the rest. Churchill wins, cleverly, to not an enormous amount of enthusiasm from the crowd. He’s short odds, and his team are winning everything at the moment – it’s Aidan’s eighth Guineas winner. The following day he will also train the winner of the 1,000 Guineas (the fillies’ equivalent) with another Galileo, and also take the second spot –with yet another Galileo. I talk about the sire’s breeding and racing record; Jack is in, as they say, ‘listening mode.’ It was his idea to go to the races. Years ago I gave him a framed print of those jockey cigarette cards you used to get before smoking became miserable. I also happened to have the equivalent loose cards, a full set, and little Jack liked matching them. It sparked something. After I’ve gone he will inherit my Vanity Fair jockey prints, worth a bob or two, but I hope a reminder of me. ‘Pass it on’ as Hector in ‘The History Boys’ says.
It was my dad engendered my interest in horse racing – I describe it in my previous batch of essays (Festivals and Genealogy). I remember a Christmas card arriving from a bookmaker’s, William Hill, with a photograph of the mighty Ribot (one of the very best post war colts, unbeaten 14 tines at the highest level). That probably hooked me back in 1956. I was 9. How?
We get back to London, leaving before the last race to avoid the traffic. Jack and Jacqui show me round their newly purchased flat and we have a – modest- drink in the garden – he’s driving me back to where I’m staying. What’s thrilled me about the day is the energy I’ve felt throughout the day. Three years ago I couldn’t have contemplated going to the races: getting there, crowds, stairways up to the grandstand. I never thought I’d have another day at the Races. And just have. My first visit to a racecourse was with Jack’s father: we sneaked off from Cambridge to see the Derby at Epsom. Royal Palace (by Ballymoss out of Crystal Palace) won from Ribocco (by Ribot out of Libra). Pass it on.