Cheltenham was frosty but warmed up with a drive-by heart-starter in the Tufty Club as a guest of the Chairman of Kelso, one of racing‘s (and the racecourses‘) more enlightened leaders. Then I hobbled away to the Cotswold Club, passing through the building site that is Cheltenham. That took some time for the hobbledeehoy, as the Turf Club and the Countryside Alliance tents were, in relative terms, closer to Auchtermuchty than the racecourse. Everywhere, there was another section for another type of Cheltenham badge. The plan is becoming clearer, and it is along Ascot lines. Take the annual members and charge them x for the privilege of coming through the gate. Or 2x with a seat, 3x with your own bar and 4x if you want to mix with hedge fund managers called Graham and have carpet in a lined tent. 6x if you want food and 10x if you want to sit in Raymond Blanc’s lap. It’s a bloody brilliant plan that will work on high days and holidays (subject to the racecourse controlling the Yahoos), and everyone will wonder why the place is empty in October and April and what happened to National Hunt racing.
It’s a shame because once upon a time I did give a 4x and now I’d rather prefer to be closer to Kelso, Perth or Ludlow. proper courses that don’t think they are the epicentre of the Sun and see their members as supporters rather than cash cows.
The Cotswold Club too seemed to have expanded. Have they added yet more tables? Hugely improved food, still in the Bento box format, and our hosts were as ever kindly attentive and the jolliest company. We left before the last and watched de Bromhead’s come 7th in Bahrain at 14/1, and I think we all knew the draw would be the undoing. We were back by 6ish, made an attempt to catch up, and then had a brilliant and exhausting finish to the day, entirely thanks to one of the best games of rugby I can remember. Les Bleus vs the Springboks, and I don’t think there was a five-minute section of the game where both teams weren’t delivering maximum effort. It was gripping.
Not the worst day’s punting. Three winners, and it would have been four if one hadn’t slipped on the bend, but I wasn’t backing anything, largely thanks to Microsoft’s failure to pay the lecky bill - which seemed to impact a host of other activities. To be fair to the Bill Gates Memorial Jacuzzi Fund, or whatever it’s called, I can’t blame MS for the Wi-Fi signal at Cheltenham, which is redolent of the NHS; it’s not quick, but you’ll hear from someone eventually. So it was almost impossible to punt or even to read my wise words again.
The fact that the outage happened at all, while all flight activity in the USA was suddenly stopped due to another “glitch”, gave me a moment of reflection and led me to think that, at the very least, we should remark, “Crikey, what a coincidence.”
So I started thinking about Ants.
I happen to know that the overnights will carry a story about our nuclear submarines and the incredibly long (and wrong) voyages they are being forced to undertake to maintain the last glimmers of our global credibility. The background to those stories, along with the news about grounded aircraft and Microsoft outages, reminded me of the old ants’ adage.
“If you find two ants in your kitchen, the best estimate of the total number of ants in your kitchen is not two.”
