There are few less amenable types of people than the disgruntled punter.
I know that there are one or two readers who are following the Saturday Nap, more out of casual interest than in the hope of making themselves rich, but I'm almost glad there aren't more than that. It won't help if I explain that, actually, you are in expert hands but it just hasn't gone quite right in picking one horse as the nap. It wouldn't prevent a hostile crowd from accosting me in the street if I explained that, actually, 8 out of my last 9 single win bets on horses have won, since last Thursday. In fact, it would probably make it worse.
But we will try to focus on Saturday and get it right. Rebecca Curtis has the great At Fisher's Cross entered at Wetherby. Let's hope that her recent litany of seconds and thirds become a win with the stable star. In the meantime, if you really want to know, and if you don't mind taking odds on, then the routine novice hurdle winner from a big stable in midweek tomorrow should be Dispour in the first at Sedgefield or I'll eat my hat.
That is the hat made out of pizza that I'll buy just in case.
--
Walking on Water only reached no.19 in Amazon's Free Poetry Download chart in its 5 days as a free kindle and so perhaps it is time to give up on being an overnight sensation after 35 years of having poems in print and return to my place in the underground. But Alan is now working for David Green (Books) and doing a wonderful job.
There is an inevitable tension now within the company between a natural marketing man and me who only really wants to write a poem once in a blue moon and then make the best of them available to anyone who wants to read them. But, don't worry, it is all about me, not him, and I can sack him whenever I feel like it even if it would be a foolish boss who fires a technical genius.
--
I had a great evening with Lou on Monday, playing the lesser known Velvet Underground albums as well as a couple he released under his own name later. I hadn't played them for years but could understand how at least R.E.M. could have been listed among the many bands that critics said were 'influenced' by the Velvets without John Cale. On the other hand, whichever dogsbody expert it was who turned up on the wireless to say that U2 were a beneficiary needs to be given 100 lines to write out. How did Lou ever equate to Bono.
It must be one of those failures of the liberal Humanities project in which no answer can ever be marked wrong if there are people let loose on the airwaves allowed to say that.
--
And so, my notes towards a shortlist for the very unprestigious and prizeless award of this website's Best Poem and Best Poetry Collection of the year must be nearly complete and ready for my discerning consideration. I have missed books in the past that would have at least made the shortlist although I don't think it has affected the choice of the eventual winner and so, if you know of a book of poems that I ought to read in the next few weeks then please let me know.
For obvious reasons, The Perfect Murder is inadmissable although in the same way that I'm sure parents like their own children more than they like other people's, I love it. If I hadn't written it, I'd love to meet the author.
How disappointed I would have been.