Sequitur or non-sequitur

I don't know if it is due to any ostensible decline in educational standards over the last few decades but opportunities to feel superior and/or exasperated at the use of language or blurred thinking broadcast on the BBC come thicker and faster now than ever before and there simply isn't time to bemoan or celebrate them all as one joyously puts on one's pedantic cloak and inserts the tyrant's monocle to scrutinize them.
But this week in an interview a representative of the Olympic Games organizers- I'm sure it wasn't Lord Seb Coe, though- I heard someone explain that the reason there were so many people disappointed that they didn't get the tickets they applied for was because 'too many people had applied for the most popular events'.
Yes, but.... if they hadn't then surely those events wouldn't have been the most popular and some others would. And if everyone had applied for the Graeco-Roman Wrestling, the Cribbage and the Su Doku then it would have been the more remarkable that seats would be available on the day for the 100 metres final to see Usain Bolt inevitably take a few more fractions off his world record.
It's amazing how much people are prepared to pay to go to see these events. They should be grateful that the public are as willing as they are to pay it and be so pleased to do so at the same time. The least we can do is admire them for it rather than criticize them for applying with such dedication and in such numbers.

Quiz - Ten Novels

Just like last week's game with poets and poems, identify if you will ten novelists and, if you feel like it, the novels.

David Green's Books

My friend Alan's daughter got a new, better digital camera. I've thought of getting a digital camera a few times but always demurred, not really seeing the need of one in the same way as it turns out that I'm in a select category of highly respected celebrities- that is Paul Merton, Danny Baker and me- that don't have a mobile phone.

But Alan said Jessica didn't want this clapped out bit of yesteryear technology any more so, rather than clog his dustbin up with it, did I want it. Well, I'm a very fussy and select, high-class kind of bloke so I wasn't going to take it off his hands until he showed me how it worked. But Alan is a very good friend to have, he's one of the best I've got or ever had and we like each other very much and so he did and so, but he's my friend, not yours, so forget it. Needing something to take a photograph of, this is my best study of one of my bookshelves.

There's the Shakespeare biographies on the top shelf, some poetry criticism and essays, Ray Carver's stories, etc. If you like such pictures of other people's books as much as I do, then you'll be matching them up to your own.

Thanks, Alan. It looks like it might be good fun.

Derby Preview

Last year I received an e-mail to ask if I was alright, the feeling being that if I hadn't posted a Derby Preview then there must be something wrong. Well, I'm a jumping man, as it were, these days, and I'm not sure if I ever did do a Derby Preview but I was moved by the concern. And, to put all minds at rest, I'll try my little best to solve the Derby puzzle now.

The Queen's horse, Carlton House, is a very uneasy favourite tonight at 5/2. Whether that's anything to do with this week's foot injury worries is hard to say but this time last week he was not going to go off at any price longer than 13/8 so you can't back him with any confidence. I believe in the ultimate free market of the betting ring more than any other clue and you don't go in at 5/2 if you thought all the evidence suggested the horse might go off at 5/4. The royal wedding made royalists of more of us than would care to admit it and even though I was at the cricket that day, I was as bewitched by Pippa Middleton as any bloke who still has a pulse but betting on horse races ought to be more scientific than how nice the owner's grandson's wife's sister looks in a nice white frock. I'm sorry, but however often the Dante Stakes turns out to be the best Derby trial, and however much I have a quaint admiration for the Queen, I'm not being led by such queasy sentiment here.

The obvious alternative last week was Fabre's Pour Moi, when it shortened up from 7/1 to 4/1, which is out of the great sire Montjeu with, is it, Darshaan on the distaff side, and without reading any form at all it began to look like a second favourite's race. But now Blue Square will let you have 6/1 and they are never knowingly generous.

If any jockey has inherited the controversial mantle of Lester Piggott, it is surely Kieren Fallon and then some. I don't remember Lester ever having to go to court to get his Derby ride but I'm sure he would have done if he had to in his less litigious days. He wants to ride Recital badly. Well, not quite. He wants to ride him well.

Unlike jump racing, where you want to evaluate how exposed horses have run over courses and distances, the big money flat is much more about breeding and here is another Montjeu progeny, one big clue, and Fallon is giving us another, rather less gracefully than when Steve Cauthen used to guide us very openly towards the pay out window on Henry Cecil horses in the 1980's. But, we take note of what we decide to deem significant. I'm the tipster in form having seen beyond any doubt that Barcelona were 3-1 better than Manchester United last week and I'm thus richer by exactly the amount I expected to be.

Recital wins the Derby tomorrow. Get on.

Unlikely Lookalike

On my old website I collected a set of vaguely similar-looking types which were me, Salman Rushdie, Shakespeare and Stanley Kubrick, to which we then added Mark Everett, the singer from eels.

It was no more than the merest bit of fun and a riff on the bald head and/or beard theme.

This week in the office, as happens, we began casting a film of our weird existence in there with actors taking our parts. Carole played by Judi Dench, etc. Leif wanted to be played by some glamorous young actress I'd never heard of but we don't need to go into that.

And then, eventually, Andrea cast Russell Brand in the role of me. Well, okay, then. I can see some connection in the scruff-pup image and wordy flights of fancy if you will but not quite so much the role of male tart and serial Lothario. Daniel said he'd never seen me look so pleased before. And it's a long time since I have been so I'm not surprised at that.

Quiz - Ten Poets

Identify, if you will, ten poets - and the ten poems, too, if you want to- from these fragments.

Send in the answers if you feel like it or tell me if they were too easy or too hard for you.

Martha's

Farewell, then, Martha's. Portsmouth's town centre pub closed its doors for the last time on Monday.

I hadn't been in it for a few years now but, heaven knows, it was a big part of my life at various times over the last 30 years.

Just around the corner from where I worked when first arriving here, it became a home from home, scene of some tremendous pool games and source of the occasional betting coup. We were the pool team for a while, or a big part of it. We were educated in the dark arts of dominos at the end of the bar by Cass Campbell and Kenny Jones, old boys who knew a thing or two that we could never quite fathom.

The most spectacular bet was when everybody was on Leysh in the Cambridgeshire at 33/1, but one Saturday night I announced that Sagace would win the Arc, which it did the next day at about 8/1.

I made my one and only appearance as a strippagram in there in 1986, was it. So it was no surprise that a few years later it had become a flagship gay bar, no doubt seeking to relive the beauty of that seminal evening.

After that I was lucky enough to be part of a regularly succesful team in the Sunday night quiz and it was a regular Friday night after work hangout.

'Gin and tonic, please.'

'Oooh, I make the best gin and tonics in Portsmouth.'

(I daresay you do, young man. I daresay you do.)

It was never less than flattering to catch the eye of a good-looking young boy in there. But I'm sorry. I wish I could have explained.

So, one's life closes down behind you as you pass through it. The last time I was in there was probably the Thursday lunchtime I beat Clifford 8-0 at pool and that was the last time we ever played pool at lunchtime. Once, having the place to ourselves, I realized we were at that moment, Portsmouth's leading gay attraction, knocking the reds and yellows around until one of us happened to be left on the black. Any hopeful homosexual turning up with with their Rough Guide would have taken one look at us and sniffed, 'Is that it? Portsmouth's not what it was.'

But time for us seems to be linear rather than circular so we're not likely to be back in there with Billy Ocean and Five Star on the video juke box, the great Ken and Jane Urquhart as our hosts, the sulky girls turning up because a Navy ship was back in; the camp young men with their little tins of vaseline or the dungareed girls swagging pints of lager are just as unlikely to be there again as the drag act or the dubiously stained green baize of that hallowed arena of tactical and technical mishap.

There would be a poem in it if I hadn't just used up all my best memories of it.

Thanks for the memories, Martha's. All our yesterdays are gone with your famous name.