Aintree, Sandown, Wetherby and Chepstow. It is like being in a sweet shop, aged 6, hardly knowing where to look to spend your pocket money. And yet we know that Friday night is about choosing that one, that one, that one and that one, completely convinced that each of them is descended from Pegasus only to arrive at Saturday tea-time with a winner or two, maybe, but a litany of unexplained mishaps to reduce the enormous potential profit to an attitude of 'oh, well, never mind'I had backed Felix Yonger to win on Sunday ante-post, him being a horse that never lets me down but I owed him an apology for not realizing he was running when he won a few weeks ago. But already Cork on Sunday is abandoned.
I have had a great week, statistically, so far on the recovery trail from some major recent setbacks with 7 winners out of a dozen but it takes a long time to repair the damage of a couple of major misdirected plunges when one is doing so with small change, defensively unwilling to plunge headlong into further disaster and jeopardize what will be a respectable plus for 2015. And it must be almost time for the Nap to get itself back into the black, too.
We will have to have a bit of a mug punt on races like the Becher Chase but that's not the sort of race to stab at with real money. It's just nice to go to bed on Friday night thinking, if one can still think, of a couple of quid turning into a couple of hundred because it can and sometimes it does.
But, sensibly, I still wouldn't dare guess at the winner of the Tingle Creek even if Un De Sceuax and Simonsig aren't in it. Not unless they could bring back Tingle Creek himself at the top of his form.
It's a shame the 3 mile chase at Aintree has been reduced to four runners with Don Poli thus odds on. He will know he's in England by the lack of numbers surrounding him. You never need to know if a race is in Ireland or England if you switch on At the Races. If there are loads of them, it's in Ireland; if there are four or five runners, it's almost certainly in England.
So my main hope is that Paddy unsuspends my Felix Yonger bet and lets me take him on elsewhere. I like Saint Are in the Becher (Aintree 1.40) but would like to dare to believe in my old, and perhaps ongoing, Grand National hope, Unioniste. There's no nap there, though.
O O Seven (Sandown 2.15) is one you might put as the one to keep a yankee together but 4/5 is not what I'm looking for.
The Skelton stable have been doing very well in recent days, there's not much I like more than a stable in form, and so Virgilio in the 2.45 at Aintree is going to go in somewhere in tomorrow's guesswork.
But Bristol de Mai (Sandown 1.55) was always a chaser to look forward to and now the time that we were looking forward to has arrived. That's the nap and, if I wasn't recovering from recent traumas then I'd be having much more on it than I actually will be. If and when it has won, it won't have been guesswork, it will have been very unfortunate that I didn't feel like lumping on.
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