The Saturday Nap

Wonderful Charm won 'readily' today to stop a recent slide in my fortunes. The 8 out of 9 sequence of a few weeks ago was suddenly seeming a long time ago. This horse has become a big favourite of mine, as any would if they had won the four times you've backed them, and if there is further improvement to come when he moves up to three miles over fences then he is surely a contender for the RSA Chase in March.
So that's 5 winners in the last two days for Paul Nicholls and, yes, why don't I just sleep with him and get it all out of my system but, rather than that, I'm sure he'd prefer it if I just continued to scrutinize his runners.
I kept on the right side of Rocky Creek last season in novice chases but I'm not convinced he can go straight into a Hennessey and win it even if there probably isn't a Bobsworth or Denman in it this year. And so there, I'm interested in Ruby riding Prince de Beauchene (Newbury 3.00).
At Fisher's Cross (2.25) makes a slightly belated seasonal reappearance having suffered a cut just before being due to carry the nap four weeks ago when Rebecca said he might not be quite fully fit. So maybe he will be by now and he ought to see off Reve de Sivola, who will be no pushover, if he is to justify our hopes for The World Hurdle although he is already 8/11 tomorrow and McCoy chooses to go to Newcastle for My Tent or Yours, which is a tip in itself.
A.P. believes in this Champion Hurdle prospect - a bit more than I do, to be honest, but how you take that will depend on which of us you think is the better judge of a horse. Me never having sat on one. But I won't be taking on Melodic Rendezvous at the prices because I've got hurt doing that once already.
But back with Nicholls, I'll want to be on Black River (Newbury 12.50) but oppose him by giving Gibb River another chance at 1.50.
There's a yankee in italics there to play with some small change and if we come out of it in reasonably good order then Jezki (Fairyhouse 2.15) will be expected to enhance our position on Sunday.
I'll make Prince de Beauchene the nap but, since we can have 12/1, go for a bit of insurance and do it each way even if I think each way is a bit cowardly.

Amazon

Following the Panorama programme on Amazon this week, I thought I'd have a look at Waterstones for books. I don't know if they treat their staff any better but it's unlikely to be wose.
So I looked at Life After Life by Kate Atkinson, a book I'm likely to buy soon. Amazon have it at £9.99 whereas at Waterstones it is £14.29.
What do you do?

Cavalier

There is an interview with Thom Gunn where he explained how once he had finished a book he couldn't start writing again and so he put a finished book in a drawer and continued writing and then published the book. Without wanting to suggest any further comparison between my writing, my frugal output and the methods of such a fine poet, I do know what he meant.
The Perfect Murder was more or less finished about six months before it appeared but in the mean time I only wrote one poem and since it appeared I had lost the very slightest inclination to even think of a poem I might write. That isn't much below my usual state of affairs but, as it sometimes does, it almost felt terminal.
But I have just started reading a biography of Milton, with plenty of illustrations of eminent figures of his time, and it was a matter of course that I glanced at two of these on facing pages and thought, 'cavaliers' and immediately a new poem was in progress. In fact it was begun at 4.30 a.m. today and finished with some thesaurus and Google Images checking not very many minutes ago. This is not the famous Laughing Cavalier I'm talking about. He seems to be an aberration. I have in mind this sort of cavalier and if anybody ever thinks there is no political edge to any of my poems then if you bear in mind Cameron, Osborne and their friends then you may think otherwise. 

Cavalier 

They took care to preserve themselves in oils

and now look past you with macabre disdain

for it’s clear that you are not invited 

to their custom of license and excess.

At this distance you can only admire

their coiffure, debonair sang froid and scorn. 

But this, then, was the last word in fashion,

expensive only for expensive’s sake.

You understand what it tacitly means 

-it’s you that looks at them, not them at you-

the least part of their delinquent manner

and as loyal as loyalty requires 

with menace in the grimace they disguise

as merely highfalutin, fine good taste.

Such rigid dignity is libertine 

and lost upon us now who, less impressed,

could have been their offspring for all we know,

and there, but for the grace of God, we go.

The Saturday Nap

As soon as Paddy Power went 'non-runner no bet' on the Betfair Chase I took his kind offer of 5/2 about Silviniaco Conti (Haydock 3.00). The fact that he has now gone 11/4 isn't too distressing.
There are plenty of other races of interest tomorrow but none that appeal as big betting opportunities so I'm happy to go all in on this early rehearsal for the Gold Cup. It is sometimes said that one shouldn't be afraid of one horse but here one could legitimately worry about at least three of them. The form of the Pipe stable advertises Dynaste's claims; one would never oppose Bobsworth lightly; there seems no end to Tidal Bay's enduring charm and Cue Card could be the biggest danger of all. I would be happy to oppose Long Run in this class of race from now on, though.
But Silviniaco was my Gold Cup selection last season and remains so for this year despite last year's fall. If he's going to beat Bobsworth then now would be the time to start doing it in a race apparently now close to Paul Nicholls' heart.
I've read the cases for the opposition and against my selection but this is one to go for and a bet that will have a big influence on whether I can finish my best ever calendar year by reaching a new level of profit or if I have to settle for something less.

A New Chess Champion....bar the shouting

and there won't be much shouting, really.

Two very quick, tame draws were followed by two draws in which I, for my very minor worth, thought that Anand was asking more of the questions.

But then it all went a little bit inevitable and Carlsen looked like good value for a 1/3 bet except by then I don't suppose any odds were on offer. Those stone-throwing yobbos on the internet were calling him Grindsen on Saturday and, yes, I thought it looked a draw. But it wasn't. And in a week that Hurricane Fly won a record 17th Grade One race, the car driver Vettel won an eighth consecutive Formula One race and Sachin Tendulkar retired in possession of a record that won't be broken in my lifetime, just after A.P. McCoy recorded his 4000th winner to set an unbreakable standard, Carlsen puts his rating at a brand new high that only he is in a position to improve upon.

Have we been lucky enough to witness quite so much wonder or will the excitement be continued in a different way.

I'm sorry that the chess wasn't a bit more competitive but it just wasn't to be, was it. But it would be nice if Carlsen could look as if he enjoyed it a bit more. There can be something a bit depressing about 'cool' being made to look so boring for them.

John Eliot Gardiner - Music in the Castle of Heaven

John Eliot Gardiner, Music in the Castle of Heaven (Allen Lane)

It is not only the depth of John Eliot Gardiner's specialist knowledge and appreciation of Bach that impresses so much but the breadth of his reading in so many other areas like history, economics, astronomy, geography and other composers like Monteverdi, Beethoven, Mozart, Berlioz and, of course, Bach's contemporaries. In most people one might take such polymath expertise as showing off but Gardiner seems to wear it so well that it doesn't look like it.
This is a heavy book not to be undertaken lightly and I was wary not to get involved in long technical analysis of music that is for performers and academics only but the opening chapters are absolutely fine. Gardiner is keen not to make the mistake so often made with Shakespeare that because we admire the work so much we would thus be equally enamoured of the personality. There is no correlation between the two but he pieces together the early bereavements, the truant schoolboy, the Lutheran culture and family circumstances to find the formative influences on an industrious, truculent, devout and demanding professional. The concept of artist or even genius would have meant little to Bach, or at least not in the terms we understand them. Bach's gift, which is in excess of any contempoary musician and arguably any other at all, was much more a result of training and study than innate talent. For him the idea of 'invention'
was the discovery of something that was already there, rather than something truly original - hence his view that anyone could do as well, provided they were as industrious. (* and since I am now so accustomed to footnotes, let's have one here)
Gardiner's consideration of the 'Class of '85', those musicians born in 1685 and just previously, doesn't have Bach foremost among them at the time. They were Domenico Scarlatti, Rameau and Handel, plus Mattheson and Telemann. Bach was not the only one of them to come from a musical family and some of the others were to make their names primarily in opera but while Gardiner is keen to find as human and accurate a portrait of Bach in the evidence, he is rarely prepared to pay anything but the utmost homage to the music.
But this is Gardiner's Bach. Very little space is given to the instrumental music - the violin sonatas, the orchestral suites, The Well-Tempered Klavier or the cello suites, for instance- whereas eventually I had to abandon the lengthy analysis of the cantatas and the choral music. That is, of course, Gardiner's over-riding area of interest and as a 'Portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach' as it claims on the cover, it does become a personal one. In these chapters - and I did get to page 368 before deciding to jump forwards- there is more than a general reader might want of the analysis of key changes, appogiatura, bariolage, cori spezzati and suchlike that I had been dreading. Which will no doubt be of great use to future generations of interpreters but it does make one wonder who the book was written for and Eliot Gardiner, wise man that he is, no doubt did what anybody would do in his position and wrote the book that pleased him.
On broader themes, it is fascinating to see Bach more than once being compared to Beethoven in temperament,
Bach was a natural dissident- almost a proto-Beethovenian rebel avant la lettre
and in the later chapters Gardiner adds to his forensic scrutiny of the portraits some insight into how circumstances made Bach the composer that he became for us, noting how if he had taken posts in Hamburg, Cothen or Dresden rather than Leipzig, he might not have emerged the same due to different prevailing cultural climates.
No, it had to be in that provincial and rather mean-spirited city, inordinately proud of its pure Lutheran Orthodoxy, its distinguished succession of cantors and its sporadic moments of cosmopolitan glory.
And so, if we get a Bach we can identify with, a driven, self-disciplined perfectionist at odds with employers and frustrated at the facilities his employers provide, the sub-standard musicians he has not enough time to rehearse, we possibly even yet don't get the full picture because however wide and impressive Gardiner's learning is, he eventually overdoses us on cantatas and where at first one thought one was going to rush to play them all again and then buy some more, I'm not.
There is just about enough credit given to Mendelssohn for his rediscovery of Bach and there is a superb painting by him that suggests he had talents enough to succeed in whatever discipline he had chosen but in the end one is overwhelmed by Gardiner, and by Bach, but I suspect we might be overwhelmed in a slanted direction when this portrait could have been balanced around a different centre.
I don't think I've listened to any Bach unless it turned up on the radio since I went past about page 250 but when I do it will be The Well-Tempered Klavier.   

footnote
* Anti-Stratfordians don't believe that 'Shakespeare' was written by the actor from Stratford because, for one reason at least, he didn't have enough education. That seems to me a bleak view that denies the possibility of innate 'genius'.  Bach here argues against 'genius' himself but not that a natural talent cannot be brought to great artistic achievement with tremendous application. And Shakespeare's education would have included a solid basis of Classical literature to which he applied his assiduous interest in the theatre. I had worried that there might be a contradiction between the two but I don't think there is.
     

Signed Poetry Books - Robert Wells

I recently entered the bidding for a signed Philip Larkin on e-Bay. Not expecting to win it but giving it a go for form's sake. I haven't yet tired of telling the tale that it went for £645.
But there was a Carcanet get together a while back and Mr. Turner who attended returned with a pleasant surprise for me in the shape of this signed Robert Wells which has some fine things in it and so that provided compensation at nowhere near the cost. No cost at all, in fact. So thank you very much to Robert for that.

The Saturday Nap

The importance of getting on early is emphasized by the fact that, having rather daringly added in Cue Card as a Tuesday Bonus the other week to no advantage, the naps are currently running at two pounds and change down to a level ten pound stake at starting price but would be very marginally in front if backed at the prices I took the night before.
Thus one comes in late tonight to find that Paddy had first offered 11/8 about Royal Irish Hussar in the first at Cheltenham tomorrow but we can only have 11/10 now while William Hill seem singularly worried about him and don't appear to want your business at 5/6. No doubt that will sort itself out in the morning. I have backed the Henderson horse but just wonder if something else in the race is even less exposed and might turn him over.
One would love to take Paddy on in his own race at 2.30 but you can't seriously bet against so many other possibilities even if it will be worth 6/1 or more if you find the winner. No, it is time to change sides. I was glad to oppose African Gold (Cheltenham 1.15) last season when he was up against At Fisher's Cross over hurdles but chasing was presumably his longer term objective and at 13/8, or 7/4 if you can get it, he is expected to be better than the opposition in his fences debut here. I was grateful to Shutthefrontdoor for retrieving the day at Aintree recently but it was a battle. I feel unfaithful deserting him after his efforts there but you would expect to see African Gold back at Cheltenham in March for the RSA Chase and so he ought to be winning this early reconnaissance mission.
I will be looking at Southfield Theatre in the 3.00 to either play up some winnings or retrieve a parlous position.

More Tav

BBC Music Magazine December 2013

It is a bit unfortunate that the BBC Music magazine's cover story is a 70th Birthday Interview with John Tavener. I have never quite understood why a magazine dated for next month should be available quite so early but when Tavener's birthday wasn't going to be until the end of January then they were getting ahead of themselves. However, the CD is a live performance of The Protecting Veil by Steven Isserlis from 1994 and so I could hardly leave this collector's item on Sainsbury's shelf.
The disc is actually well presented for such a budget purchase and has 70 minutes of music. In her note, Joanne Talbot says that,
...Tavener.. sidestepped modernism. As such, he sharply divided opinions, ranging from outright hostility, with charges of sentimental extremism and being interminably sanctimonious...
and, indeed, not everyone I spoke to about him today was an unconditional admirer. I suppose I had my own doubts about anybody quite so engrossed in the spiritual but you can take from it what you will and don't have to go the whole way with him. Even if sincerity is not the essential quality we look for in art these days it isn't either something to be disregarded. The opening of this disc is immensely powerful and the sound quality is superb.
It will be worth checking what they put on these from month to month as I've never bought it before but there is clearly an unthinkably vast catalogue of BBC concert recordings that could be put on disc. I can't see any other broadcasting organization compiling quite such a back catalogue if the Murdochs and media free marketeers ever succeed in abolishing such a fine institution.
The magazine itself is a sort of Gramophone-lite and doesn't want to upset anybody too much. If one is going to get a publication like this, I'd rather have the real thing and risk some of it being beyond me rather than suspect all the time that these short reviews have stretched a few small points as far as they can go in order to make a magazine of glossy adverts and pictures of big name musicians look serious. I'm being a bit unfair perhaps but I don't mind feeling out of my depth as long as I think I'm reading the right thing. And Richard Morrison is given a column in here and we are not his biggest admirers. When asked by a telephone canvasser why I didn't read The Sunday Times I recently said because Jeremy Clarkson is in it and that was pretty much Quod Erat Demonstrandum.
But with Tavener, I've never understood the admiration that some music fans, or fans of any other genre, have for complexity. By all means, I'm sure it can be very satisfying but the lack of it doesn't automatically equate to 'easy' or something less worthy. This is highly impressive music, scintillating at times. To take Larkin's 'pleasure principle' point, I know I'm enjoying listening to it and will want to listen to it again and that is really all I need to know.

John Tavener

It added considerably to an already great occasion when John Tavener appeared from a seat to take a bow at the end of Natalie Clein's performance of his Popule Meus in the Cadogan Hall Prom in September 2011.
Although a prematurely frail figure by then it still comes as a bit of a shock that Britain's pre-eminent composer has died at the age of 69. In the 1990's he was one of a number of composers who either converted to or emerged in a renaissance of highly spiritual but accessible music along with Henryk Gorecki, Arvo Part and the younger James MacMillan. The Protecting Veil was a great commercial and artistic success in the recording by Steven Isserlis and the Song for Athene was a profoundly moving feature of Diana Spencer's funeral. As well as his numerous settings of religious texts, mostly taken from his adopted Greek Orthodox belief, two string quartets are of particular interest, The Last Sleep of the Virgin and The Hidden Treasure, one written to be heard at the threshold of audibility to represent his awareness at the edge of consciousness during serious illness.
One didn't need to share his religious convictions to appreciate the spiritual power of his music Of the many composers that one might be aware of now from our period, I'm sure his will be remembered as one of the far fewer names whose work will be played and appreciated throughout future generations.

Best Poem and Best Collection 2013 Shortlists

The winners won't even get a cup as magnificent as this little trinket presented to the winner of Portsmouth Poetry Society's annual competition but it is nonetheless a sincerely considered tribute and not easy to win. The Best Poem and Collection that I've read in the year.
First of all, the poem or book needs to come to my notice and then I have to decide I'm interested enough to read it. This is an appallingly difficult criteria for any poetry to meet if not written by anyone I recognize as a personal favourite but I do read reviews and sometimes specifically scan the internet or the Poetry Library for likely candidates, not initially for the purposes of the prize, of course, but to find new poems worth reading.
Once I'm reading it, then, the poems are well ahead of the opposition from the huge amount of new poetry published each year and the game is on to make the shortlist. I will provide some commentary when the winners are announced next month but these candidates will be considered further for a few more weeks while I convince myself I got it right.
A list of previous winners was compiled and put here on the equivalent posting last year.

Best Poem

Sue Hubbard, The Ice Ship, from The Forgetting and Remembering of Air
August Kleinzahler, A Wine Tale, from The Hotel Oneira
Roddy Lumsden, Women in Paintings, from The Edinburgh Review 137
Glyn Maxwell, The Case of After, from Pluto
Sinead Morrissey, A Day's Blindness, from Parallax
Sean O'Brien, Lamplight, from Poetry London 74
Michael Symmons Roberts, In Babylon, from Drysalter

Best Collection

August Kleinzahler, The Hotel Oneira (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Sinead Morrissey, Parallax (Carcanet)
Michael Symmons Roberts, Drysalter (Cape)

View from the Boundary

It is approaching that climactic time of year when it begins to look as if nothing else is going to happen and even though more than 10% of the year remains I can decide which poems and books go onto my shortlist of the year's best.
In the meantime, I can summarize the minor awards which have grown up in the wake of this little-known prizegiving.
The prize for the best event usually goes to something that I have attended but this year I didn't go to any Proms, not to Cheltenham for the Literature Festival and missed some other of the things I often include in a year's itinerary. And so, exceptionally, or at least for the first time, my best event was Chic at Glastonbury which I only saw on telly, probably the best way for me to see it, but still found Nile Rodgers quite a moving and exhilarating experience 35 years after he was my favourite pop act.
Of the few new novels that I read, I think Colm Toibin's The Testament of Mary stole it in the end and so now I'm reading The Blackwater Lightship, which so far seems similarly good.
The best CD I bought was John Holloway playing the Biber Mystery Sonatas (Virgin Veritas) although it was not a 2013 release so that category is not limited to new issues.
The poetry shortlists will be here later this evening.
--
But I see from Eyewear that there are to be poets invited to Buckingham Palace although nobody seems to know which ones yet. I wonder why that would be. Is the Duke of Edinburgh to be sent abroad on a trade mission promoting British-made verses to spearhead the economic revival based on the export of slim volumes to unleash our new tiger economy. One wouldn't have thought so.
It seems to have caused some consternation about who has received an invite and, more to the point, who hasn't. I remember similar trouble being caused when some kids from junior school were invited to certain birthday parties and others weren't. But some poets do seem genuinely put out by it. I hope it is not in the hope of any such recognition that they ever got involved in the industry because the pleasure of reading and writing poems is all the reward there needs to be and it really ought go no further.
Todd Swift is surely an admirable organizer and energetic publisher, editor and general factotum but he is taking it a bit hard if he thinks he has been left out of a 'defacto Who's Who'. Part of our pluralist culture these days is the admission that there is no canon, no centre and no official reading list and so to even entertain the thought that the guests at the palace are such a thing looks like an admission that deep down there still is.
As with any such choice of names, there will be some missed off who would have been suitable, worthy or would like to have gone. But as I find myself saying increasingly recently, no award, prize or recognition actually makes one's poems any better than they were already. The poetry world does appear to be run more on cliques and groups as much as it ever was and I don't think there's any end to that in sight because it is somehow inevitable.
Whereas it is a good thing that The Echo Chamber is back for another brief run in the Poetry Please slot. All too brief, I suspect, as it would be nice if it were a permanent feature, a magazine of the airwaves bringing more poets to such an audience. This week it was Michael Longley and Roy Fisher. Poets like these are established figures not because they are 'mainstream' or 'safe' or 'establishment' but because they are any good. I doubt if they would be upset if they weren't invited to a reception to fleetingly be in the same room as royalty.
--
But all of our precious institutions are under attack. I saw that Adrian Chiles has been given the job on Radio 5's Drive on Friday tea times. Perhaps the legend Peter Allen has not been doing Fridays for a while now but if this is the thin end of the wedge and the latest place that Adrian Chiles has washed up then my increasing migration from habitual Radio 5 listenership to elsewhere can only continue.  
Meanwhile, I have two shortlists to compile. So excuse me while I do. 

Signed Poetry Books - Cliff Blake

One of the great advantages of being a part of a 'community' of poets is that you inevitably get back more than you put in. I generally think of poetry as a solitary activity rather than a social one but the benefits of turning up to the Portsmouth Poetry Society meetings over the last few years have been considerable.
I recently dished out copies of The Perfect Murder there and was delighted to get back in return Rhapsody, Rhyme and Rhythm by the great octagenarian rhymer, Cliff Blake, and so I got him to sign it so that he could be a part of my pantheon of signed poetry books.
It is a fine selection that begins with Cliff's outline of his 'modus operandi', not quite a manifesto but an explanation of his way of working. Some of it sounds exactly right to me, like,
Sometimes it appears to magically come from nowhere.

Not all of it does, though. And that is because Cliff isn't the same sort of poet as me. He says,
I consider a poem without rhyme as prose

but he qualifies that very acceptably by continuing,
although it may be associated with poetry by having the other attributes.

Perhaps we will talk about that next time, sir. The first meeting of PPS that I ever went to was in 1982 and the subject was 'What is Poetry?'
I don't know if I want to go through all that again or not. But thanks for the book, and a very articulate summary of how you do what you do. Welcome to my collection.

The Saturday Nap

It was reported that cars leaving the car park at Towcester yesterday were turning round to go back in when it was announced that J.P. McManus was buying everyone on the course a drink.
All the tributes to A.P. McCoy's 4000 winners echo the same admiration of the dedication, the will to win, the single-mindedness and even the somewhat reluctant star in the spotlight. As my tribute I show here my copy of The History of Fontwell Park signed to me by the great man.
The poll in the Racing Post identifies Wichita Lineman's Cheltenham win as his best ride which was one of many that surely no other jockey would have worked at and galvanized to such a success from a horse who, let it be remembered, did at least his fair share of the work. Battle Hymn at Ascot several years ago was a similar one I remember because I had backed it and that's what it's like in racing - one remembers one's own winners for money. And so slightly less strenuous and more easily achieved wins were some of my favourites like Black Jack Ketchum in the Novice Stayers Hurdle at Cheltenham and At Fisher's Cross last year.
I was not one that was too dismayed when Clan Royal was very unluckily forced out by a loose horse in the National. A.P. was going ominously well at the time but it was one of my National wins that year and so you win some and you lose some.
As McCoy well knows because a few years ago at the Festival, race after race went by, then a day and another day without a winner and his expression was increasingly more on the grim side of taciturn. It might have been the year that Valiramix died in the Champion Hurdle which didn't help.
Synchronized and Darlan were two other high profile fatalities in recent years and then one might have to temper the adulation with the opinion that perhaps he didn't succeed as substitute jockey on Denman either.
All of which downside is only to balance the successes with some trials and tribulations, to say that it wasn't all a picnic in the park and that, in the words of Lester Piggott (when explaining a defeat to an owner), he couldn't come without the horse.
4000 winners at a strike rate of, let's say very roughly, 25%, is 16000 rides which will virtually all have been at least two miles and often more than that. So that is likely to have been more than 40000 miles with a fence every couple of furlongs and although obviously with the advantage of riding one of the best horses most of the time, it will have been done quicker on average than anybody else went.
So, a driven man, a modest man, a record that surely to goodness won't ever be beaten and thanks very much for signing the book that day. It was Stubbsy that picked it up and asked for me. I wasn't actually there.
--
So, are we going to back A.P. to celebrate tomorrow. Not for the nap, we're not, no.
Saturdays at Wincanton at this time of year can turn into Paul Nicholls benefits and he is delivering the winners, most noticeably on Saturdays, at present. And so we will see what price the bookies put up about star novice chasing prospect Wonderful Charm and then, if that's not going to be exciting enough, scrutinize the prospects of Far West. One of these, or maybe something else, will be in bold letters here later this evening.  
--
That Wincanton Hurdle at 2.05 looks a cracking race in prospect and the bookies don't seem to agree yet. Ladbrokes go 7/2 Far West and 5/2 Melodic Rendezvous, and there are two other serious contenders, whereas Paddy goes 11/4 joint favourites.
But Paddy is 6/4 Wonderful Charm at 3.15 and even though he has already shortened up Third Intention from 11/4 to 5/2, that's the nap and there's a double in there for anybody in an adventurous mood.

World Chess Championship, Anand/Carlsen

This was the historic position reached last night when rizagex resigned to give me the win required to break through to a new personal best rating of 1418 on FICS, the Free Internet Chess Server, http://www.ficsgames.org/cgi-bin/show.cgi?ID=345625038.

It is an ambition achieved, only to be replaced by a new ambition to go higher, but I won't be risking that for a little while and will play only unrated games. I am already rated well above my ability on there, at 48.06% of the way down the list of registered players, which is odd because when I reached 1417 a long time ago, I'm sure I was about 46% but the distribution must have altered. I'm not going to ruin my ranking while the World Championship is on because, of course, such prestigious status gives me every right to pontificate on the match that starts on Saturday, http://chennai2013.fide.com/.

Magnus Carlsen, aged 22, would appear to be Champion Elect but would miss out on being the youngest Champion ever because he is nearly 23 and Garry Kasparov was 22 when he won the title in 1985.
Carlsen's rating makes him officially the best player in the history of the game but such ratings are only that and it would be a matter of some debate if he is already better than Kasparov, Fischer, my personal favourite Capablanca, and all the others. It certainly isn't for me to say, who is well aware of what it's like to enjoy watching sport without having the faintest idea how the players can do what it is that they are doing.
Carlsen, it seems to me, will pursue a win, or fight for a draw, to indefatiguable lengths and sometimes get it but in a match that is these days over 12 games, it is a situation in which an early advantage to one side or the other leaves precious little time for the loser to equalize. The schedule of tournaments and matches nowadays surely means that the exhausting race to six outright wins will never be used to decide the championship again. That title, as in every other sport, is just another sponsored event in the calendar. A win with white by Anand early on could see him retain the title against all apparent odds if he can then play out the remaining games as draws and so I don't recommend taking odds of 1/3 about Carlsen.
Anand might have dropped down the official rankings but he is a wily old hand at match play and I, for one, wouldn't mind seeing him delay the inevitable in making the languid Norwegian wait a bit longer to add the Champion's title to his overwhelming status as World no. 1.
The recent match, I think in the Candidates Tournament through which Carlsen earned the right to challenge Anand, against Aronian, returned us to those heady days of weird accusations and paranoia with the suggestion that Carlsen hypnotizes his opponents. Aronian appeared to blow a safe position and Carlsen prevailed.
Or is it that Carlsen doesn't break under pressure whereas his opponent eventually does. I don't know. But one thing that many of these Uri Geller-type insinuations have in common is that Viktor Korchnoi is often involved in them. Korchnoi is 81 years old now and very much not to be disrespected but here he is somewhat disrespecting Sofia Polgar, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxeiGipoFSE. And that was ungracious.
So, when it kicks off in Chennai on Saturday, I'll be following. Given the choice, I am usually a supporter of the underdog and so, for what it is worth, I'll be hoping rather than expecting that the champion will retain his title.

The Replacement Nap

Gone Too Far is the new nap in the second race at Wetherby.

L'unique is fancied in the mares race at 1.50 and Declaration of War is worth a go at 7/1 in the Breeder's Cup after midnight.

The Saturday Nap

I'm not Long Run's biggest fan and so will only watch the Chrlie Hall Chase at Wetherby.

There is no need to think too much tonight, though. If At Fisher's Cross (Wetherby 3.00) is anywhere near fit- and Rebecca Curtis had a winner to follow a lot of seconds and thirds in recent days- then he should signal that he is on his way to the World Hurdle. If you can get even money then take it while it is there.

But I will add a Tuesday Bonus to the Saturday Nap and suggest we include Cue Card in the Haldon Cup at Exeter in the project.