The New One defied massive Irish confidence in Pont Alexandre as well as a recent malaise in his own stable to produce a hugely impressive finish to land the nap for my Cheltenham Festival Preview at a quite generous price this afternoon and if you didn't take advantage of my advice then I'm afraid you only have yourself to blame.You make yourself what you want to be, don't you.
The example of George Best made me want to be a footballer and, aged about 10 or 11, I convinced myself that I had replicated one of his goals by side-stepping the goalie and passing it into the goal, playing for Dinglewell Junior School in about 1970.
I don't know if I had one model that made me want to play cricket but the feel of hitting boundaries off the middle of the bat- every so often- was a drug not quite equalled by knocking the stumps over as a bowler.
It would have been seeing the list of titles of Thom Gunn's books- Fighting Terms, The Sense of Movement, My Sad Captains, Touch, Moly, etc. that made me want to have a list of my own. And now I have- Museum, Mute, Reptiles in Love, Re-Reading Derrida on a Train, Walking on Water, The Last of the Great Dancers and, hopefully eventually, The Perfect Murder.
Apart from the fascination with the numbers that used to come up on black and white television screens before the mysterious horse races, it was also partly the influence of my grandfather that made horse racing seem like some esoteric enterprise that I felt I ought to know something about but the real moment of conversion was probably seeing a young Alex Higgins on A Question of Sport identifying races from their finish. It might only have been obvious things like the previous year's Champion Hurdle but I was impressed and immediately wanted to be able to do such a thing. And now, it looks as if I can.
The advice offered here on horse racing has, so far, been overall worth following. It seems to me a sort of magic that once had been unfathomable but has become possible. Heaven knows how much it cost me to learn.
But that is enough of the vainglorious self- congratulation. Good for me. In those various spheres, I became something like what I wanted to be. But the success of it might only be measurable by seeing how many people want to emulate that and become like me. I can't imagine there would be very many.
