The Three Wise Men Preview Cheltenham

Racetrack Wiseguy is thrilled and privileged to have Spenno and The Professor as guests here this evening to help with the annual adventure into that dead cert of profitable sporting excitement which is the Cheltenham Festival. At least, it always seems like it will be until the first race, when all hopes are still alive, faithfully nurtured and nothing’s got beat yet. But, in the words of Marc Bolan, it really doesn’t matter at all because it is only money.

The considered advice of the Three Wise Men will be encoded in bold for Racetrack Wiseguy, capitals for SPENNO and bold italics for The Professor. It's not intended to be competitive but given some of the match-ups that it has thrown up, it's almost Meghan v. the Palace in a couple of big races. 

After the Irish Gold Cup/Champion Hurdle meeting at Leopardstown in early February, it looked as if one only had to copy across all of Willie Mullins’s winners in the big races to their equivalents at Cheltenham and one had an automatic pass to doubles, trebles and your choice of Lamborghini but it’s possible in the circumstances that Mr. Mullins trained his best horses for then and made sure of prizes worth having just in case any further lockdown prevented him sending them to Gloucestershire in March. So, although most of them are quite clearly superstars and expected to win next week as well, you never know.

The first day is always the best because it has three guaranteed top races and anything’s still possible. Ideally one wants to have the winner of the first, like having a sound pair of opening batsmen (unlike England in India), to have something to build on. I’m not doing that. I’ve got Metier in an ambitious combination bet in the hope that Appreciate It is not one of the surest Mullins certs.

In what looks like being a tactical affair, it's clear that I’m making the early running with Spenno coming with a late run and the Professor settled in mid division.

Shiskin, and in fact Shiskin, won the first race last year, one of our rare successes then, and surely wins the second race this year in the Arkle, 1.55. It's so good, it is mentioned twice because it is a part of the Professor's treble, too. He agrees that we wouldn’t be getting any sort of price without the opposition from Ireland so we’re glad of that and it’s the first part of both the Prof and the Wiseguy trebles. But after that entente cordiale, it starts to get rough.

It’s soon followed up with Honeysuckle (nap) in the Champion Hurdle, 3.05, with my special offer 3/1 looking worth having. I’m more afraid of Goshen who looked great again at Wincanton, but didn't beat  much that day, than Epatante who looked great last year but didn’t have the likes of Honeysuckle to get past.

But it’s not only game on, it’s an early thrilling head-to-head with the Professor coming through loud and clear on the wire with,
Epatante (nap), Champion Hurdle. Disappointing in the Christmas Hurdle where a back problem was subsequently identified and cured. The useful 7lb mares allowance in effect makes it a match with Honeysuckle, but Nicky Henderson knows how to train a Champion Hurdle winner and fingers crossed adds to his tally here.

Well, we'll see about that. It's Ali-Frazier, or Barney Curley vs. Luke Harvey, all over again. May the best man win, as long as it's me. And it's my website so the headline picture is of Honeysuckle. But I've been wrong before and we'll be fine on Weds morning, I'm sure, when we've dead-heated for second behind Goshen.

It’s still me kicking on first thing on Weds, at 1.20, with Bravemansgame who went clear of what looked a good field at Newbury at the end of December and Monkfish, at unrewarding odds will be a banker for many at 1.55. After Leopardstown, pundits who know far more about it than me were pencilling him in to win everything from the Monaco Grand Prix to the Boat Race. And then, in a rare excursion into handicap company, I’m happy with my small share of 20/1 about Bachasson that would possibly be tried in a better race if his stable didn’t have so many other options but Spenno’s each way there is MY SISTER SARAH, ‘33/1.... solid performer in handicaps, ran 4th behind Concertisto last appearance, looks overpriced.’  Spenno’s handicap each ways are suggested in their most likely races but might run elsewhere, where they would still be his picks.

But, making a significant move, he then makes CHACUN POUR SOI (nap) the foundations of his treble in the Champion Chase and it’s literally every man for himself, with me not taking sides but the Professor coming in with Altior in the Queen Mother, 'What a swansong this will be for a great horse at a very backable price. Forget what has happened this season. Spring ground and Cheltenham we will see a different horse.'

Some people like the Cross Country chase. It almost looks like a different sport to me. I did have Kilcruit down for the bumper but now there seems a tide of opinion against it so I’ll happily miss out a race in which my main memories are of good things coming second or third.

On Thursday it’s difficult to find an angle on the March Chase first up for me but the Professor is with Chantry House and it’s possibly only lunatics that get involved in the Pertemps Final. Again, The Ryanair Chase is a bit too open to be convinced about for me but Mister Fisher is mentioned in dispatches in a race that ought to be given a bit more respect than the sort of consolation race some regard it as. There is no shame in being good at 2 and a half miles. It's like the 800 metres, the only race I ever won at school. Not a sprinter, not a stayer, still found a distance to win at, though.

But, as long as I’m still in business, I will persevere with Thyme Hill in the Stayers Hurdle at 3.05, contrary to all the science some might say but eventually the up-and-coming horse beats the old champion. Quite how Paisley Park got in front last time, I still don’t know. The Professor had warned me that day and somehow he was right and I was wrong and he's taking me on again. And it's not just that, it's the last leg of his treble. It's a good job we're mates. I’d counted my winnings before they were snatched away that day so maybe I’ll get some back this time.

Spenno's heard Mr. Henderson putting in a word for MORNING VICAR in the last at 4.50 and adds it to his each way list. I have a feeling we might all be on that in one way or another but it'll be for small change but to win for me if I'm doing okay.

Thursday is still a great day's racing but it makes you wonder if it would still be genuine Cheltenham if they stretched the festival to five days of six races. I'm sometimes beginning to fade a bit by Friday unless I'm winning which seems to provide energy of its own. But I'll be okay this year, betting like Boycott's batting rather than Gower's, or mine come to that, and safe in the knowledge that I won't be behind for the year. This is all paid for already.

Nobody's gone for impressive recent winner, Tritonic, in the Triumph Hurdle. I'm sure at 9/4 he's better value than Adagio at 10/1 and the rest of those at the top of the market are trained by Gordon Elliott, who I'm not sure we're allowed to talk about any more than we play our old Gary Glitter records. One hopes that, as ever, the heroic horses will provide compensation for human failings.

Intrepid each way man, Spenno comes in with
PIC D'ORHY, County Hurdle, 1.55, 'Paul Nicholls, 20/1... may look a little high in the weights but won last year's Betfair Hurdle under 2nd top weight, back from chasing. Will run his race.'

The Wiseguy treble suddenly multiplies itself up into glorious orbit with the 8/1 I have in a few multiples about Barbados Bucks in the Albert Bartlett at 2.30. I don't know if it's 'under the radar' or something, it is third favourite, but it's looked entirely the business so far and was surely aiming for this all along. I don't think they're surprised to be there with it and could well exceed what it's achieved so far. 

And then it's the Gold Cup and it really kicks off. Spenno says,
'AL BOUM PHOTO, 3/1, in the Gold Cup, should complete his task and make him a 3-time-winner', and with that he launches his late run up the hill as the second leg of his treble. But that is the very reason I'm against him. I'm not convinced he's good enough to win three Gold Cups and he must surely get found out. That eight-mile specialist (unfortunately there are no eight mile races), Santini nearly caught him last year. Then you think back to Champ coming out of the clouds to snatch the RSA last year and what a good trial he put in over two miles at Newbury and you wonder if, for once, they found the right horse to match with the name.

The At the Races Preview Night didn't seem to consider Champ much at all but our Seven Barrows correspondant, the Professor, thinks they have it, and speculates with 'backing both Champ and Santini with a cheeky reverse forecast is the way to go. Henderson looks like he has the winner.' So it is a discordant congregation we have with all different hymn sheets and plenty of sporting debate going on. It might just be mathemically possible for us all to come out in front overall. Somehow.

I'm very much in favour of the Mares Chase which inevitably looks a bit shoved into a gap after the Lord Mayor's Show but something has to happen at 4.15. My old favourite Shattered Love is in there alongside Annie Mc, who I would be part owner of if being very lucky in a draw run by Corals but Spenno completes his treble with the sensible option of ELIMAY, which could well be a wise way of picking one out at not a bad price away from much louder hullabaloo.

But it isn't over until it's over and there's still CRAIGNEICHE, Martin Pipe Cond Jockey Handicap, in the very, very last, at 4.50, of which Spenno says, 'Nicky Henderson, 16/1... looks to be very well handicapped if he can get in. Not had many runs, so open to significant improvement.' The Professor is with that, too, so it's also Craigneiche and so I'll be trying my best to last that long and be there with them with a little bit of whatever's left.

Nothing can possibly go wrong.

Music from Proust's Salons

 Steven Isserlis/Connie Shih, Music from Proust's Salons (BIS)

Steven Isserlis is among the top few of my favourite musicians in a very competitive field. Proust's A la Recherche, it was decided here last year, is the greatest novel. So the equation meant that it didn't take much to sell this disc to me.

From the title I misled myself to expect music a bit lightweight or even Palm Court but those fin de siecle salons attracted the top talents and not much of this is lounge music.

It most appropriately begins with Proust's very close associate, Reynaldo Hahn and his gorgeous Variations chantantes sur un air ancien which is only 4'54 but the very highlight of the album. Try it here,

 Sonorous and resonant, it would have been more 'retro' then than it sounds now as with Hahn's utterly blissful baroque pastiche in the song A Chloris. This is an album of music for cello and piano and throughout it Connie Shih is worth her equal billing with Isserlis, here in restrained dialogue until the moving ending. The trilling of notes in the cello part is subtly done and not decorous. It's a wonderful way to start, relatively uncomplicated, before the bigger pieces to come. It set me off in search of more Hahn, of which there's not that much readily available, but we will see. Any more like this would be essential.

Gabriel Faure's Romance and Elegie have more demonstrative moments. Proust was a big fan, as Steven's cheerful sleevenotes tell us. For me, he is at least up there with Ravel and Debussy if not ahead of them on account of the dreamy Requiem but they had more demanding aspects to them as well and we are being softened up a bit for the first of the two major works on the disc, the Cello Sonata no.1 by Saint-Saens who in at least some small way provided the model for the composer, Vinteuil, in A la Recherche. As in the Cesar Franck which is to come, the piece gives Connie plenty of opportunities to demonstrate dextrous and expansive playing when not providing the support role. What one gets from both musicians in this music is a sense of 'flow' which, having looked at two Bach Suites played by Steven on You Tube recently, where he seemed to me to be breaking it more into distinct phrases, is very much what all of this repertoire demands. There's also the original finale to the Sonata included for anybody who feels like deciding if an artist's later improvements are worthwhile. Camille presumably thought so but up to a point a professional artist does what they have to do to please their patrons.

Henri Duparc and Augusta Holmes were students of Franck and provide a lead in to the 28'22 of his Sonata in A major that Steven reports comes from the later period of Franck's career in which he became more exaggeratedly Romantic on account of an infatuation, or whatever it was, and where would art be without those. I only just finished Humphrey Carpenter's biography of Benjamin Britten this morning and so I feel more qualified to comment on that than I do on Cesar Franck, Proust's favourite composer next to Beethoven. But he reaches exuberant, or disturbed, heights in a piece with only two instruments that adds plenty to my idea that less is more and somehow smaller forces can seem to generate more than a whole orchestra which I first thought in the 1970's with my cassette of Pictures at an Exhibition with solo piano on one side and Ravel's orchestration on the other. I much preferred it unorchestrated.

Franck's Sonata becomes torrential. It is a hugely satisfying album with music by composers I wouldn't naturally go in search of and that is the value of artists like Isserlis. Already on order is his forthcoming book on the Bach Suites. Already on the shelves are gamba sonatas from the baroque, his recent Tavener album and bits in between. I've seen him playing the Haydn and Shostakovich concertos amongst others and his favourite composer is Schumann. So, as well as being apparently the kindliest bloke in the world, happy to stop and sign my programme when he had to find his way into Portsmouth Guildhall via the bar once because he couldn't find his way in through the back door, he's exactly the advocate music needs, at home in any period. Not that any evangelistic advocacy is really the motive. He quite clearly does it mainly because he believes in it and wants to. O, yes, and because he's fantastically good at it.

Fulke Greville at PPS

 Tomorrow's scheduled meeting of Portsmouth Poetry Society was due to be my contribution to the programme, on the subject of Fulke Greville. In the circumstances, these meetings have been taking place with some success by e-mail and so I'll be sending out my succinct introduction tomorrow. 

But waste not, want not. It might be of interest to one or two further afield. I dare say my enthusiasm for Greville owes a big debt to Thom Gunn. I don't know how many times I've made something one of my favourites through the recommendation, or following up a connection from others. The Magnetic Fields, Patrick Hamilton, August Kleinzahler and any number of others became essential to me by having been important to somebody else that I thought must 'know something'.

So, lds & gnlmn, Green on Greville, for what it's worth.

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Fulke Greville (1554-1628)

There were 87 names on Wikipedia’s list of candidates for who wrote the plays and poems attributed to Shakespeare the last time I looked. Fulke Greville, the second Lord Brooke, who lived roughly at the right time and in Warwickshire is one of them, and one of the more accomplished writers, but it is still highly unlikely that he was responsible for Shakespeare. They might have met or been known to each other is as close as the connection gets.

Fulke Greville owned Warwick Castle that his father had bought in 1601 but also had a house in Alcester where he probably spent most of his time. He won a by-election to become the MP for Southampton in 1580 but after that was declared invalid, he briefly sat for a Yorkshire constituency before being the MP for Warwickshire with any number of other official positions whether they involved much work or not.

He wrote the first biography of Sir Philip Sidney, the Elizabethan courtier, soldier and sonnet writer, who was a close friend. Apparently highly regarded by Elizabeth I, he more than once was on his way to Europe to take part in the latest fighting but was called back to London by the Queen. But possibly the most interesting thing about him was that he was murdered by a servant who thought he was inadequately provided for in Greville’s will. On a visit to London, the servant stabbed him twice and left him to die, which he didn’t immediately do, and then went elsewhere to stab himself four times more successfully.

There are plays and some political poetry but Greville’s poetry that remains most readily available is his collection Caelica (*), which Neil Powell describes as a Collected Shorter Poems rather than a ‘sonnet sequence’ because only XLI out of CIX are sonnets anyway.

The early poems in Caelica might be called love poems. As Thom Gunn points out,

Nowadays the journalistic critical cliché about a young poet is to say that ‘he has found his own voice’, the emphasis being on differentness, on the uniqueness of his voice, on the fact that he sounds like nobody else. But the Elizabethans at their best as well as at their worst are always sounding like each other. They did not search much for uniqueness of voice:

In VII, the world changes but the beloved is constant,

Man made of earth, and for whom earth is made,

Still dying lives, and living ever dieth,

        Only like fate sweet Myra never varies,

        Yet in her eyes the doom of all change carries.

And that early intimation of ‘doom’ echoes throughout Greville’s dark view of human life.

In X, feeling rejected, he despairs that,

What dazzling brightness hath your beams benighted,

       That fall’n thus from those joys which you aspired,

       Down to my darkened mind you are retired?

And decides that ‘those sweet glories’,

Must, as Ideas, only be embraced,

    Since excellence in other forms enjoyed,

     Is by descending to her saints destroyed.

Man’s degraded condition is corrupt, vain and absurd and can only find salvation in God.

C despairs at the ‘witty tyranny’ of being trapped in a prison of one’s own thought,

In night when colours all to black are cast,

Distinction lost, or gone down with the light;

The eye a watch to inward senses placed,

Not seeing, yet still having powers of sight,

 

Gives vain alarums to the inward sense,

Where fear stirred up with witty tyranny,

Confounds all powers, and thorough self-offence,

Doth forge and raise impossibility:

 

Such as in thick depriving darknesses,

Proper reflections of the error be,

And images of self-confusednesses,

Which hurt imaginations only see;

 

And from this nothing seen, tells news of devils,

Which but expressions be of inward evils.

One of the longest poems is CII, which finds Hell in human consciousness, and sin is a ‘Little-ease’.

‘Little Ease’ was a prison cell located beneath the White Tower in the Tower of London. The lightless cell was designed 1.2 metres (3 ft 11 in) on a side, meaning that while an adult human could be placed inside, any occupant was prevented from being able to either stand, sit, or lie down, meaning it was impossible for him to find any physical position of rest.

CIX, the last poem, prays,

Yet Lord let Israel’s plagues not be eternal

…

       Rather, sweet Jesus, fill up time and come,

       To yield the sin her everlasting doom.

 

Religion was politics, too, in C17th England and Greville’s Protestantism is possibly Calvinist in its devotion. But his politics were pragmatic, too, possibly seeing the benefit of at least superficially siding with the king’s favourite, Buckingham, who was otherwise not popular. George Villiers was assassinated in Portsmouth High Street, just across the road from the cathedral, only a few weeks before the murder of Greville.

Greville had planned a double tomb for himself and Sir Philip Sidney in St. Paul’s Cathedral but that was never built. Instead, he has an outsize memorial in St. Mary’s Church, Warwick.

* If anybody has any ideas about whether to pronounce Caelica as ‘kai-lee-ka’ or ‘ce-leeka’ or any other way, I’d love to know.

Bibliography

Fulke Greville, Selected Poems, edited by Neil Powell (Carcanet)

Thom Gunn, Introduction to Selected Poems of Fulke Greville, in The Occasions of Poetry (Faber)

Joan Rees, Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, 1554-1628, A Critical Biography (Routledge & Kegan Paul)

The Invalid Poem

 What happens when a poem turns out to be untrue. Does one have to discard it.

I knocked off the piece of doggerel below last thing last night in honour of our historic visit to the vaccine centre today. I haven't printed it off to go into the file but I like it the more I  look at it and so it might make it into the squad for any further print book. 

But the visit was abortive which makes the poem potentially invalid by reason of its untruth. Either I was wrongly advised I could go or the volunteers at the centre weren't up to date with the latest state of play. But never mind. It was a nice day for a walk and a further episode of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads. I am now booked-in rather than walk-in and will have a go later this week. 

I am not in the business of finding fault with the heroic NHS who are doing much better than marvellously. I was told in writing last year  by someone who must be non compos mentis that,

The NHS is not God.  

and I've never been able to agree more with anything that came from such diametrically opposed reasoning. The main difference is, of course, that the NHS exists. It is only a secondary consideration, but still a crucial one, that the NHS has been doing something about it whereas libertarians and their elected governments, so keen to defend their own freedoms at the expense of others and ready to cite 'God' whenever they run out of other justifications, have presided over unnecessary carnage.

I'll look forward to Thursday instead.

Meanwhile the poem looks likeable enough and so far is marked 'stet'. Bob and Terry, also known as Sailor Boy and Racetrack Wiseguy, had their lovely walk in the early Spring sun and the episode didn't turn out as expected.

 

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I finally became a proper Graham Swift completist with Out of This World over the weekend. So gorgeous to read, so much to enjoy and admire without that novel being in his top few, perhaps. Most novelists would be very glad of anything that good.  With such a vast range of references in such a relatively few pages, I strongly suspect the underlying poem is far better than I'm giving it credit for. If there is a contemporary novelist who seemed born for the role, to who it appears to come so naturally, I don't know who it is.

I gave myself a break from Humphrey Carpenter's biography of Benjamin Britten which is 'detailed'. I'm not sure how much detail one needs. It would be of more value to a more devoted Britten admirer and I appreciate that level of high resolution in books on Larkin. I'm back with it now, tyhinking that I can make it to the end and read Vita Sackville-West's The Edwardians before the grand arrival of the monumental Thom Gunn letters.

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It is 'one of those things' that many of the more successful betting coups happen when they are not advertised by Racetrack Wiseguy. I had thought I was happy to lock down until battle commences at Cheltenham on 16th but I was tempted out of it and landed an easy double on Saturday. And then with a free bet that Corals kindly added in, I put Champ into the portfolio of investments at 5/1 to go with the special offer of 3/1 for the Champion Hurdle snapped up on Honeysuckle.

The Three Wise Men will be reconvening here around about the 11th in the hope of directing all who enter here towards the pay out windows.