It's Now or Never

It wasn't our intention to find ourselves in Portsmouth's premier shopping mall on Black Friday but we did. Well, I said, it's an insight into how the other half lives and Richard said, Or how they've been told to, or something like that. They were certainly wise words.

But the point is that we have reached that time of year when it's time to pull up the drawbridge and have even less to do with the ways of that world that one usually does. It's almost time to review the year, to envisage at what figure the profit from the turf will be set and not place any more orders for books or records.

I wish there was some sumptuous, essential hardback of at least 500 pages on the radar that I could spend early December with but I can't find such a thing and, good for them, the Portsmouth Library Service haven't yet got the latest, specious, space-filling book on Shakespeare in their catalogue for me to borrow and rip to bits for fun.

So, there's little point in having a library, or the shelf of things waiting to be looked at, if one doesn't return to them. The library will be needed next week but on the shelf are two more of Kundera's that I've read before but bought for completeness's sake. I think the first, The Joke, is the best of them, from when he was more Czech and less Parisian. After only its short first chapter this morning, I know I'm going to enjoy re-reading it all over again.    

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And everything, in spite of everything else, was good news today.

The Wiseguy double delivered in the last races at Wetherby and Hereford at the better prices taken last night to put the project at a year's high with our visit to Sandown coming up.

And, on our walk and thus our weekly Heardle challenge, we predictably went 0-1 down on the 90's but then absolutely bossed it with Bonnie Tyler, The Real Thing and the absolute gift from the 60's, to me, of,

   and there's not much more to ask when Nigel lets the whole glorious thing play and then listens patiently to the subsequent lecture on that masterpiece by the Emeritus Professor of Cliff Richard Studies at Copnor University, Me.  

All good, then.

Nothing can possibly go wrong.

The horse for tomorrow is Paradias (Lingfield, 1.45), picked ahead of other options with some confidence. It's a short price, you shouldn't be putting your life savings on it but the system continues to work. It's my time of year, it's my type of horse and if it loses it has already been paid for by the two that obliged today. I'm like Maigret, I will get it right in the end. I always do.