Just another nice person gone...

A fond memory and all the racing on TV and the Dublin Racing Festival selections

Can I remind you that the Cheltenham Gleaner is now active? It is updated almost daily whenever I hear news about entries and plans. The Festival Finds post is more concerned with the Handicaps and can also be found under the Cheltenham tab. Both are available to paid subscribers, so I urge you to consider a subscription for the rest of the year. 

I was sad to see that Marianne Faithful had died this week. Sometime around 1977, I used to run a gaff in Camden Lock called Madisons - before which it was known as Lock Stock and Barrel. We were very trendy, and even though it had the old stabling and cobbled floor, and even though we served food redolent of a struggling mid-west diner in Hicksville, Nowhere, for some reason, people came.

Perhaps it was because it was Camden, or maybe because I employed the most beautiful, personable and ultra-cool people, including briefly a young Paula Yates, but whatever the reason, le Beau Monde would come and eat with us. Among them was Marianne Faithful. On a few occasions around Sunday brunch time, she’d come in, and if she was alone, she’d invite me to join her for a coffee, and we’d jaw about this and that, and what our weeks had been like. She was kind, thoughtful, and beautiful, and when she laughed, one was so thrilled to have amused her. One always somehow hoped she might remember. John Cleese used to come in, sometimes with Connie Booth, though I think not happily. I made him laugh once but never fancied him as much as I did Marianne.

Some 22 years after our last brief chat, she produced her album Vagabond Ways, in which her voice was, I think, at its poignant best. The title track encapsulates everything I loathe and detest in self-righteous politicians hiding behind Government-driven faux science and was inspired by the last forced sterilisation of a teenager in Sweden in the 1970s, under their Eugenics laws.

God keep Marianne safe in his care.

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Perhaps prompted by that subject, I am aware that by this time next year, after intense pressure from the Oliver-Cromwell-Was-A-Satanist faction of the Puritan Left, the Government may well have decided that when you pop into the GPs for the annual prod, or perhaps when the nethers require some attention, the Nurse or Doctor must ask you whether you gamble. There will no doubt be a series of questions like, “If you do, does it either (A) Make you cry or (B) Cause you to feel like battering the children to a pulp with a ball-peen hammer?”. I have no idea what happens if you say Yes to either of those - but do remember that everything the Government collects data-wise, it sells - so I expect your insurance will go up and your credit rating will come down.

How dare these ghastly people even consider, during a doctor’s appointment, asking anyone whether they gamble?

What happened to Doctor Bobby, who