Racetrack Wiseguy at Christmas

It's not been an easy year. One doesn't expect it to be easy as things worth having usually have to be worked for but that's betting without William Hill effectively confiscating the balance of my winning account and refusing to discuss the matter, the Autumn campaign setting off on the wrong foot a few weeks too early and the general realisation that it can be harder than one thought. It turns out to be true that the bookies and the whole industry would prefer me to be their cash cow and not them mine.

Well, that's not going to happen. I play my game and if it doesn't fit with theirs we need not play at all. Several months ago 'No More Mr. Wiseguy' was announced here and I've stuck with that but it ain't over til it's over, there's a profit going into the book for 2024, a bit carried over to begin 2025 with and they don't get shot of me that easily.

Kempton on Boxing Day, though. Like Dennis Brown, I'll have money in my pocket but I can't get no love for betting on the big races. And, as with Johnny Nash, there are more questions than answers.

Constitution Hill is at best a 2/5 shot on ratings but not even favourite with most bookies showing prices for the Christmas Hurdle. If anybody can bring him back to the wonder horse he was, it's Mr. Henderson but how do we know until push comes to shove. Lossiemouth is also immaculate, in receipt of 7lb, except possibly not the horse of a lifetime that the Henderson horse had promised to be. Don't let anybody tell you they know the answer to this one. Nobody can. I'd be on Lossiemouth if I had to have a bet but I'd prefer to see Constitution Hill see her off, giving away the weight, still not out of second gear. Only a fruitcake could lay into that race without the sort of faith that carries religious types through the day.

The King George is hardly any better. Much as I love Grey Dawning, that was a crucifyingly hard race he had at Haydock and I was there at Ascot when Altior and Cyrname all but finished each other's careers for them in heavy ground. Il Est Francais was readily pencilled in for this with his win in the Novice race this time last year but then was pulled up lamely, whether actually lame or not, in France last time and so, again, it's anybody's guess. And anybody concerned to make money rather than lark about with it is best advised not to guess because it's a hard enough game when one takes it carefully and seriously.

No, I'll be in front of the telly to see what happens but relaxed about my plus or minus situation. Hyland's been impressive, exceeded expectations perhaps, and so could be a bet in the Novice Chase and there must surely be chances to be taken round the gaff tracks on what remains a proper bank holiday of racing. But, as Ding Liren found out in the chess, it's better to be happy with what you got and stick rather than do something pre-emptive that turns out to be ill-advised.

2024 was another profit year even if it doesn't feel like it. Let's say it paid for a new suit, the printing of the book of poems and the expenses of going to Cheltenham in April.

That'll do. 

The Complete Hardy 2. The Trumpet Major

If you're a great writer and wrote 14 novels, one of them has to be the least impressive. What I have difficulty with is comparing the lesser work to that of other, maybe lesser, writers. One might think more of The Trumpet Major if it were not by Hardy and it could be raised up by saying it could have been whereas since it is by him it comes off worse up against Tess, The Return of the Native and The Woodlanders.

It has the same ingredients as the likes of Far From the Madding Crowd with its three more, or less, suitors pressing their suits on the eligible Anne Garland with the Loveday brothers being good candidates and Festus Derriman clearly not. But if Festus is undesirable he is comically so, being pestering and duplicitous rather than dastardly like Alec d'Urberville.

George III makes a cameo appearance perhaps not unlike the then Prince Charles having a part in Coronation Street as he once did. It's perfectly good as a book and only suffers in the way that Don Paterson said of the lesser of Shakespeare's sonnets, that when he says they aren't very good he means 'for Shakespeare', which still means 'good' by ordinary standards. One would certainly not, though, want to read it ahead of the more justly better-known titles.

--

Breaking up the sequence before moving on to The Well-Beloved, I was grateful for a recommendation that came out of reaction to Romanticism.

Bruges-la-Morte by Georges Rodenbach is gorgeously short with the Dedalus edition's pages flying by, illustrated as it is by unpeopled photographs of the place. It's also morbid, both haunting and haunted as Hugues, after the death of his beloved wife, goes to live in the atmospheric other-world of Bruges which we might care to compare with Amsterdam in La Chute by Camus, Venice in Don't Look Now or even Hamlet's Elsinore.

Hugues finds a doppelganger of his wife in Jane, an actress but, as we saw in The Trumpet Major with Matilda, 'actress' is shorthand for 'trouble'. It's a poem of a novel even given the ever-present caveat of it being in translation and maintains its sepulchral beauty until the shift up in gear of the denouement. Perhaps, so brief, it is long enough because the urge in the first half to immediately order everything else by Rodenbach had subsided a little bit by the end but it's way ahead of its time, psychologically or 'modernly' and more Rodenbach in due course is a definite possibility. 

Poignant

I passed the Eastney Community Centre, named after someone called Frank Sorrell, just now.

It's where I saw Peter Doherty in a gorgeously small gathering in 2022. I think there were about 110 there which was great when he sells out tours of much bigger venues in an instant.

One might have thought they'd have put a preservation order and a blue plaque on it as the place where I saw Pete but, no, I expect it will be a block of flats there by next summer.

I've lifted these pictures from Facebook but will hope to replace them with a photo of my own so that it can continue the very occasional series of photos that brought to mind  poems, the poem in this case being Peter's great Far from the Madding Crowd from his lockdown album where he lamented the temporary closure of his performing spaces,

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

They closed down all the bars
...
Where am I 'posed to sing my song
Where the only place that I belong...

 

except they've knocked down that one for good now. 

It's probably very sentimental of me because I hardly knew the place was there before Pete's gig in it and I've not been in it again since but it does feel as if a tiny little piece of me and pop history went with it. Nowhere near as much as the devastating decision to let some dealers have all my pop vinyl for £120. That was idiotic. But gradually the past disappears behind you.

I'd better get myself to Nottingham as soon as I can before anything more I remember from the 1960's is removed or defaced but after sixty years maybe it's the difference I'm going back to see rather than the exact places and people as they were there in 1967. 

The Complete Hardy: 1. Desperate Remedies

Perhaps in the end all fiction is 'genre fiction'. Don Quixote was chivalric, albeit pastiche, The Woman in White is a detective story, The Turn of the Screw a ghost story and once one reads Desperate Remedies and finds it comes from the tradition of the lurid C19th 'sensation novel' then so are Tess, Jude and Casterbridge.

It's rarely difficult to differentiate the goodies from the baddies in Hardy and here, in the first published novel, Manston is a scoundrel in the same mould as Alec d'Urberville, lacking the capacity for self-awareness and regret that even Michael Henchard is later capable of and it's human motivations more than those of the fates that propel the drama although we are allowed a happy ending which we are to be denied in the big, mature masterpieces. 

Some Hardy set pieces are already in place with neither readers or characters always sure of their circumstances due to the absence of some characters not necessarily being due to them being dead. Hardy was not only an architect of buildings but also of storylines but the poet he first set out to be and eventually became, along with his deep knowledge of scripture and folklore all combine to make him compelling reading and if other, mostly later, prose fiction writers are more sophisticated in their art, he inevitably takes a high place among the best of them.

Owen Graye, devoted brother of the lovely Cytherea, reports to her what their father had told him,

'..don't love too blindly: blindly you will love if you love at all...Cultivate the art of renunciation.'

In his own commentary, Hardy observes that,

It is the exchange of ideas about us that we dread most;

Mr. Springrove, father of the 'good guy' suitor, Edward, tells Cytherea that Edward has,

seen too far into things- been discontented with makeshifts- thinken o' perfection in things, and then sickened that there's no such thing as perfection. 

All of those things are surely distilled, if downbeat, wisdom that form and equation with the outcome that,

'the difference between a common man and a recognised poet, is, that one has been deluded, and cured of his delusion, and the other continues deluded all his days', which is Edward ahead of his time in the mid-C19th when 'poet' could still equate to 'dreamy idealist'.

Whether Hardy ever translated any of these philosophies into his own life is doubtful but as a writer he was aware of them whatever his shortcomings outside of his fiction.

 

It was much to do with Hardy that reading took up its central position in my life and he's lost nothing in the fifty years since. Next up is The Trumpet Major as I make my way towards some sort of completeness. He is the most solidly reliable of authors and from hereon in his books will only be punctuated by others so that I don't mix them up and begin to wonder what's happened to a character from the book I was reading the previous week.

World Chess - Gukesh

Maybe even I could have won it from there and it was certainly worth ploughing on with a pawn advantage when the computer analysis was showing the draw at 99% but I would never have got myself into that position at 6.5-6.5 in a best of 14.

Ding was at a big time disadvantage but offering the exchange of rooks was clearly a brainstorm and that's precisely what Gukesh was playing on in the hope of. So, 18 years old and World Champion. There's not really much else for him to do already but he's not the best player in the world so maybe he can aim at being that.

The big drama clashed with the 12.55  from Warwick where another odds-on favourite got badly turned over.

 

I am, though, at an all-time high in three of the four disciplines at Lichess, having reached 1807 at Bullet and so it might be Classical for a long time now to try to put that at a personal best, too.