Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

April Fool's Day was inevitably a bit of a let down. Anybody who was looking forward to a selection of hilarious hoax stories must realize that the very specific industry of making those up is one of the first casualties of last year's news. Having woken last year to find that Donald Trump was president of the USA, the UK had voted to leave Europe, that Leicester City were football champions or Boris Johnson was Foreign Secretary, anybody would be more than happy to believe that spaghetti grew on trees.
Never mind hoax news, or fake news, fiction has never been as good as fact and real news is weirder than stuff you can make up. It is the fundamental problem with science fiction. I'm sorry but that is just more man-made stories set in space; space itself, not being man-made, is far more interesting.
But there is something fake or even hoax about all news. There are far more reports about the events of Jesus Christ's life but Matthew, Mark, Luke and John told it the way the early church wanted it told and so theirs are the versions given precedence and selected for the anthology of books put into The Bible.
But, there we are, All Fool's Day is all but over.
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The Chichester Canal makes for a fine walk on a temperate afternoon like it was today. Start at Dell Quay and then the best plan is to have some mates who know the area, are experienced walkers and are happy to follow the instructions, and go with them. In exchange, one can regale them with tales of intrepid adventures from the front line of the poetry world or summarize one's late-burgeoning songwriting career to which they listen politely. Then come home to find your horse won so there's still some ammunition to aim at Aintree and the trip to Cheltenham.
I backed Just a Par at 40/1 after its last run, thinking that the other trial race on the same day had attracted all the attention and this was under the radar. But it still is. I don't quite know why you can still get 50/1 for looking. So, in a race that I used to do very well at until a decade's worth of under-the-radar types have made it a bookies' banquet again, it is well overdue that one of the favourites should win. I understand the case against most of them more than I can recommend any with confidence but the one I can side with more than any other is Cause of Causes. But it's not in bold because it's not a tip. There will be more sensible investment opportunities in other races on the day and if Finian's Oscar is over the setback that kept him away from Cheltenham, he'll be the one in the novice hurdle at 2.25.

 But there's not much more photogenic than an old church surrounded by the long forgotten dead and this industrious coot was putting in an admirable shift, fetching one suitable addition to the nest building project under the bush at a time and I'm sure he'll be satisfied with a good day's work and a job well done when it's finished.