Racetrack Wiseguy and the Ante Post Plunge

 It's not obvious how to turn a £1 free bet into worthwhile money. I'm not ungrateful for the small bonus from Corals but one might as well go for the big one rather than fiddle about trying to win a real fiver with it.

I have five horses lined up for Cheltenham in March. A few years ago one of Mr. Henderson's stable lads landed a very ambitious five-timer on their own horses, won a million quid and went off to set up his own stable in America. I won't be doing that with the odds already having shrunk to 99/1 against all five winning and that includes the ante-post risk that any of them not running spoils it anyway. Ante-post generally is a mug's game but it's one you can play with a free quid that's there's not much else you can do with.

I'll save the names of the five horses for a Cheltenham Preview nearer the time. Two are surely copper-bottomed, the other three must have good chances. I'm not that thrilled with the prices of some of them this far ahead but what can you do. It might only pay 50/1 by Tues 15 March.

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Wendy Lesser's book, below, has provided the ideal opportunity to work my way through the Fitzwilliam Quartet's consummate account of Shostakovich's brilliant, brilliant (brilliant) cycle again. She makes many astute points that I make myself sometimes, only she does it far better, not least the unsatisfactory nature of writing about music. It is about 47 years now since  I first became acquainted with Quartets no. 3 and 8, recorded onto cassette from the wireless through a microphone. They are no less sensational now than they were then and Wendy makes the rest of them just as compelling. At present, finishing the book and the set of CD's look like being co-terminus, as it were, even if they haven't remained in step pace with each other.  I'm expecting another run through the discs to follow hard upon this one, reading the summaries if them alongside. This is in spite of some opposition frrom Corelli's Christmas Concerto that I heard the other day, desperate to listen out for what it was at the end.

Some music is worth every effort and, like Bach and Shakespeare or maybe Proust and James Joyce, never wears out and always has more to give. Such things give the impression that one could spend your whole life with them but one can't because there are other things and so one enjoys the impression, the sense of depth that it creates and the knowledge that they will always be there to return to. But the Shostakovich Quartets, for me, are the C20th's answer to other monumental cycles, like the Bach Cantatas, all of them, or Cello Suites, maybe the Josquin masses, of course the Beethoven symphonies and piano sonatas, the Mozart operas. They are terse, bleak, lyrical and absolutely get it right. They are the music and anything you say about them only makes them seem less and so it's best not to say too much.