Cheltenham Preview with Racetrack Wiseguy

 

The Cheltenham Preview industry is becoming almost as big as the festival itself with every Tom, Dick and Harry who's got an opinion that anybody can find signed up to share their hapless guessing for the benefit of audiences who think they're going to learn something.

So let's hope they know something, then, but the Wiseguy tip for the pundit worth listening to is Kevin Blake.

I've had a bad year so far, I'm not afraid to admit, and am only ahead because I carried forward a healthy amount, promotions on bookmaker's websites help, I've withdrawn to pitifully low stakes and the on-track bookie at Fontwell made a mistake and paid me twice as much as he should have done but it won't show in his records so there was no point in telling him.

 

State Man is a good horse that might have had a few Champion Hurdles lined up ahead of him waiting to be collected but he reminds me of Excelebration, the horse unlucky enough to be the same age as Frankel who thus mostly turned up only to see his rival's backside leaving him behind in the final furlong. State Man is the only one likely to have a chance of finding a way of beating Constitution Hill but 11/4 is not tempting enough to make me invest in him doing so. They could try chalking up 20/1 but, like Spenno said at Fontwell last week, Constitution Hill is 'unrateable' so far. He's apparently seen off all the classy opposition he's had by some distance and without coming out of second gear. He's never going to be a price worth taking, not least because he frightens off most of the opposition there could have been. We might never know how good he is so I hope he goes over fences and further and wins a Gold Cup or two rather than make the Champion Hurdle a non-event for the foreseeable future. Although horse racing doesn't usually work out like that.

However, the knock-on effect is that there is no point in Honeysuckle (Tues, 4.10) taking him on. Matt Chapman, in his ebullient way, insists that she's kept her form and is running as well as she ever did when winning her hurdle titles but she wasn't up against much when she did. Thus, it's entirely common sense to go for the Mares Hurdle and finish her glorious career in the winner's enclosure by outclassing the ever-improving Marie's Rock even if it is only by a short head.

Mr. Henderson's Luccia (maybe Tues, 1.30, or otherwise Thurs 4.50) has done nothing but impress so far and will be a bet whether taking the easier option of the Mares Novice Hurdle or if we have to trust his judgement that he can beat Facile Vega, who got beat by surely going too fast early doors at Leopardstown. Not all of us still trust in God but we will have to trust in Mr. Henderson on that.

Also on Day One, there can often be some good things hidden away in the non-headline races and Gaillard du Mesnil (Tues, 5.30) might well add to more than Willie Mullins's fair share of the winners slightly under the radar. There was nothing wrong with what he did at Leopardstown and the extra distance might make him almost nap material.

On Wednesday, I'm not convinced that Paul Nicholls thinks he has the ammunition to take Cheltenham on with these days but Hermes Allen (1.30) has done it all very well over hurdles even if his future is going to be even better over larger obstacles. We will see about that, as we will about Queen's Gamble, now available at 16/1 for the bumper (5.30) after her very distressing defeat at Market Rasen last week. There have been more names crossed off the Cheltenham short list in recent weeks than added to it.

If there's a reason for not getting involved in the first on Thursday it is that Gordon Elliot looks like he has the better horse but I don't want to take on Mr. Mullins with it. 

Last year's dead cert, much better than a penalty kick, Allaho, is doubtful for the Ryanair Chase and so I've no idea where we stand but I liked all I read about Teapuhoo (3.30) and his easy warm-up win that takes him to the stayer's hurdle as a horse on the upgrade that obviously has one to beat but you don't get 3/1 if you haven't.

In a Gold Cup in which the dour stayer, Stattler, who would probably win if they went round three times instead of twice, is 13/2 third favourite, one might think Galopin des Champs, who put lots of daylight between himself and the second in the Irish Gold Cup 'from the back of the last', must be a good thing. I can't see which one beats him unless Ahoy Senor continues to make the form book a complete waste of time. If I'm winning, I might have a couple of quid on Bravemansgame but I'm not even sure he'll run there. And, if it was, by some outrageous fluke, completely party time, I'd stay on for the last, the very last, after what can sometimes seem to be a hard week, and keep faith with a favourite horse, Fantastic Lady.

But this is a dodgy game, much like batting, that seems easy when it's going well but hellish when you can't quite get it right. I'll be taking it carefully, not seeing the point of throwing money around with the same wild-eyed optimism as those ostentatious, tweed-clad twenty-somethings who used to board our train to Ascot at Twickenham and start shouting the names of horses to each other.

I'd have laid them all at least 16/1 about all those they saw fit to mention and I'd have cleaned up. They are those who think a day at the races costs a few hundred quid and then don't give it any further thought.

But I'm not like them at all. I much prefer it if an interest or a day out can pay me.

I hope Honeysuckle wins on Tuesday and Gaillard du Mesnil should do, too. It could be all over after day one if Luccia's made it a treble by winning the Supreme but we might be waiting until Thursday for her. I'll be throwing Teapuhoo into the trebles that involve them all and Hermes Allen can multiply them up if it all goes right. I just don't want to find myself in the workhouse that is hidden somewhere in the small print of Jacob Rees-Mogg's manifesto. I don't think writing about local classical music concerts is what he means by 'work'.     

 

The Age of Bowie

There were two books on Lou Reed and two on Marc Bolan in the pop music section of my library and an obvious David Bowie-shaped hole. I had forgotten I'd ordered something to fill that so when it turned up it was a surprise Christmas. I had chosen the Gospel According to Paul Morley. If John Peel was the avid collector and like a watcher of the skies for all things new or arcane and Stuart Maconie was the super-annuated anorak, Morley is the pop critic as T.S. Eliot, a cultural scribe going deep into meaning and significance. He is also far too much of a devotee of Bowie not to tell us everything he thinks at some length.

We are on page 69 before the detailed biography starts and all we've had by way of preamble is Morley letting himself count the ways that he can describe how Bowie is forever 'other', not even himself for he immediately subverts and moves on from being one Bowie to being the next, having been David Jones and other names before he was that. It is excessive, if something can't be pinned down, to spend quite so long not doing so.

The biography is useful and instructive but Morley is like a student intent on making everything in his essay pertinent to his thesis. At the age of 3,  young David is found by Mrs. Jones putting on her make-up and after that every anecdote is laden with significance for how it contributed to, or was an early indicator of, the later Bowie.

Like The Beatles and Marc Bolan, he serves a long appenticeship before, after several years of obscurity and failed projects, he becomes an overnight sensation, each incarnation for Morley containing some ingredient of the eventual Bowie. And why wouldn't it. We are all the product of our DNA, where we came from and everything that ever happened to us. So, dull, emotionally distant parents, dull Bromley but a vivid imagination and, like Rodney Trotter, just one 'O' level - in Art is the perfect recipe for a rare talent to become self-obsessed and develop the ambition to escape although thousands similar presumably didn't. Needs must these days that few would have quite as long to find their way and would be consigned to the call centre or the lowly clerical job that Lou returned to after the Velvet Underground before arriving at their Space Oddity.  One thing I hadn't known is that the significant teacher that saw something in young David Jones was the Art teacher father of Peter Frampton who, after being in a teenage band with our hero, for a while sold millions more records than he did by way of some vapid soft rock and a gadget that for unexplained reason he made vocal noises come through his wah-wah pedal instead of doing a guitar solo.

Morley's account will be worth the time and effort, hagiography though it may be and probably not filling the Bowie-shaped hole as it doesn't. But maybe that failure, which tends to occur in Shakespeare biography, too, is the point. David Bowie's art was the sort of art that looked as if it was art but the quote attributed to Mark Twain that 'Wagner's music is better than it sounds' might need to be adapted to 'Bowie's music is great because it sounds great' and that, in the highly contingent, fashion-conscious zeitgeist of pop culture from Andy Warhol to Damien and Tracey, Gilbert & George that's all it needs to do. The more one says about such things the more likely one's chances of saying something unnecessarily portentous multiply themselves exponentially. It's like when we used to go out to look at the pitch before a cricket match. It's best to look and just nod sagely rather than say 'there's some runs in that' before contributing very few to 52 All Out.

Somewhere below here it says that disc 1 of Best of Bowie, especially if we could add in Heroes from disc 2, is as good a disc's worth of pop music by a white artist there's ever been. Paul Morley is right to say that for 'our generation', his and mine, he's two and a half years older than me, Bowie was more important than The Beatles. Yes, I had Beatles wallpaper in my bedroom, was excited by She Loves You, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah and Ringo was the funny one and my favourite but I was 5. That wasn't like Ch-Ch-Changes, Drive-in Saturday, Station to Station and, yes, Starman, though. 

They are, like Morley suggests Bowie is, both fake and real, alienated but with some sense of community and somehow impossible to define, maybe like a Rembrandt self-portrait, so it might be a bad idea to try to define it and better to just 'know'.

Marc Bolan seemed to simply enjoy being top of the pops for a few years and said a few cryptic things in interviews but he was much more obviously joking than Bowie, who took his mystique more seriously, made himself look more 'art' than 'pop' and that is probably why it's always seemed possible to love T. Rex more than Bowie but admire Bowie more than T. Rex.    

Maggie O'Farrell, The Marriage Portrait

 Maggie O'Farrell, The Marriage Portrait (Tinder)

On the evidence of Hamnet and now The Marriage Portrait, Maggie O'Farrell exemplifies everything one could want from fiction to make reading the great pleasure it can be at its best. Yes, George Eliot, the accessible James Joyce, Julian Barnes, Thomas Hardy and any number of others but, coming straight out of this book so deeply impressed, it's hard to think of anybody whose prose is quite such a champagne experience to be immersed in.

It is in the very writing. Quite how profound it is, I'm not so sure. On the face of it, the story of Lucrezia, the teenage bride made Duchess of Ferrara, as a substitute, in 1560, isn't much more than Henry VIII all over again. It might not be more more than a cimplistic feminist tract in which our sympathies can only be with her innocence, fragility and artistic talent isolated and at the mercy of the wicked Duke, Alfonso, his need to produce an heir, political expediency, his unremitting ruthlessness and uncaring cruelty. Lucrezia's life doesn't count for much to him and is soon in the way whereas, like any such tyrant, it can't be his fault that no heir is forhcoming even though we can all see he's firing blanks. And, we understand, not only in her direction.

It might be possible to read the book from the sort of Clarksonian, Trumpian, Boris Johnsonian and Henry Tudor point of view that says, no, women are accoutrements of only limited use but it would be a radical interpretation. We don't need to be convinced of any moral rights and wrongs because the prose is alive, or pulls off the legerdemain of seeming to be, in all its sensuous gorgeousness and that is what convinces and would be the point of reading it ahead of any taking of sides that we are given little choice about.

As with Hamnet, I had thought that fact and fiction were two different things, and opposites, that shouldn't be mixed together. Stories are surely one or the other. But that's not right and I've changed my mind. All history is partly fiction, coloured by those who wrote it, interpretated as they saw it and filled in with detail that 'must have been' or 'might have been'. And fiction has to be based on something real, or relate to it, or else it would be meaningless, recondite and do nothing for us at all.

Maggie's 'author's note' at the end sets out exactly how she adjusted her source material to make her story, maybe via Robert Browning's My Last Duchess which forensically justifies what she's done just in case there were any doubt. I'm no longer convinced there are such 'facts' as pure, reliable history. Certainly not having lived through the Trump-Johnson Axis. I'm not sure there's pure fiction either. Maybe I could have worked that out for myself before but it is The Marriage Portrait that brings it so readily into focus.

But even that is not the main point. It's a thriller, compelling not only in its exciting finish - and I'm sorry to say that some minor characters have to be routinely or mistakenly murdered as collateral damage- but for the sheer thrill of how it does, honestly, transport the reader into its world. As has happened a few times before, I raced through the last pages like a dog bolting its food so greedily that more enjoyment could have been had by savouring them but, what can you do.

There is a trick to it, a technique, and it might be one that only a writer born to be such could pull off without missing a beat. I'd be very sad if Maggie O'Farrell had been taught how to do it on a creative writing course. I hope it qualifies as serious 'literature' and it's surely better than genre 'historical fiction' but I also hope such books fly beyond any such categories and are simply 'any good'. I can hardly imagine a reader who would not enjoy it. I would feel sorry for any who didn't. 

The wonderful Library Service provided it. For all that the general prognosis on almost every issue in the world is bleak, we at least still live in a country that not only will do that for us but the NHS are determined to keep us alive as long as they can so that we can take advantage of it. It would be a dire and dismal soul who found reason to complain about that.

Piano Spectrum at the Menuhin Room

Piano Spectrum, Menuhin Room, Portsmouth, Feb 11

Andrew McVittie and Helen Morris set this new series of recitals in motion with a hugely enjoyable shared programme billed as 'carefully selected piano sounds designed to soothe the mind and body'. 

Andrew was first up with Debussy's First Arabesque and made it glisten but maybe the much-vaunted Steinway helped and it continued to live up to its reputation from hereon in.

Helen's Philip Glass, the Étude no. 12, was another version of that piece that he usually writes with its rhythmic and harmonic misfits expressing more than such limited use of the palette one might think could offer in its tones of modern melancholy. But if Andrew's Rachmaninov Prelude, op. 23 no. 6, was intended to suggest cherry blossom then it was invested with more of an emotional charge than any I've seen.

Piano Spectrum was the title of the programme rather than the double act and Andrew was interested in synesthesia and what colour the Adagio from Beethoven's Pathétique sonata is. Being completely immune to the condition, I voted for green but few of the audience did so with me so it was a bit like some General Elections. Maybe it's reddish, then, but what I heard was Andrew beautifully paced and modulated. While tempi tend to quicken and speed is sometimes achieved for its own sake, music is not a competitive sport - I hope- and Andrew relaxes comfortably into his music.

Three original compositions by Helen herself were an attractive special treat. Written as exercises for her students, it was too tempting to try to find which composers she had borrowed from. Maybe none at all and such things might all be in the mind of the listener but maybe if Michael Nyman turns down his next commission, it could be offerred to Helen.

Andrew's Grieg Nocturne was a restful night for the most part but his account of Philip Glass, in the Metamorphosis no. 1, was as evocative as Helen's but necessarily more ominous and both performances, as candidates for the main highlight among several, could easily send one back to the likes of Koyaanisqatsi, Akhnaten and maybe the Violin Concerto to re-live their out-of-kilter C20th aesthetic which came before our more recent need to bury ourselves in the comforts of Bach and the C18th.

Emma Lou Dierner's Piano Sonata, just the first movement today, was the most demanding piece to listen to and, quite likely, to play, departing more than somewhat from the stated manifesto. Good Heavens, where does it go from there, having scattered itself in all directions and put in such a rumbustuous finish. Helen delivered it with impressive panache without necessarily making it mean as much to me as the gorgeous finale.

Andrew returned with Farewell to Stromness, the misty, nostalgic elegy by Peter Maxwell-Davies, again very much at home relishing something that sounds timeless in the music and not going any faster than he has to. It was a gorgeous finish that carried me home. Had there been a four-handed encore, which maybe there could have been, maybe it wouldn't have and, honestly, it would have been unreasonable to have expected more.

Andrew's comments have implied that there is more, maybe 'better', to come, from this series but it won't need to be any 'better' for it to completely or more than exceed our optimistic expectations. It was great to see this first event well supported but it wasn't full. You'd be well advised to get your seats for the rest of the events before anybody else does.

Thanks for being there, Helen, and Andrew, who has done such a good job of making it happen.   

Humphrey Lyttleton, Blues Excursion

 The last record on the Playlist schedule, leading up to 1 a.m. as the finale in The Jazz Show, is this but they aren't appearing here in any order. There's loads more still to appear.

One Tuesday evening in 1969, my mother very patiently sat with me while we went through a pile of records in search of the tune I wanted. We hadn't had a record player very long and Aunty Chris had donated a pile of roughly 'jazz' records and I knew there was a good one among them. We played Tommy Dorsey, Syd Lawrence, maybe Glenn Miller and possibly Satchelmouth. No, it's not that. Nope, nope. Hang on a minute....no. 

Eventually we came to a 10 Inch, 33 rpm disc that didn't look likely but there weren't any others left. Yes, that's it. It was Beale Street Blues on Jazz Session with Humph I was after then and we found it. It's a tremendous album. I am no jazz man but Humph's user-friendly retro trad is its most acceptable face. Blues Excursion takes up most of the second side, its lack of urgency giving space enough for Wally Fawkes, clarinet, and Bruce Turner, alto sax, for their excursions as well as Johnny Picard (it says here) on trombone and Humph's signature trumpet. New Orleans was re-created for a British audience by public school, ex-army Humph, in a way that pre-figured the blues being the inspiration for two like-minded art school students who met on Dartford station and decided to form a beat combo and acted out their fantasy quite realistically for the next sixty years and counting. Popular music, and all art, was ever thus, taking something you loved and doing something else with it.

British Trad Jazz was more faithful to its precursors than most, though. The laments of a New Orleans funeral are carried forward, it is syncopated sadness and these gentrified college boys paid respectful homage to the likes of Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet and Bix Beiderbecke. They weren't like the rock'n'roll people by who they were due to be swept aside into the niche they've occupied ever since but they weren't so different.

It was Trad, Dad. And most things turn out to have been so in the end.

Diana Ross, I'm Still Waiting

 Once a disc jockey reaches the age of 80 and has been broadcasting for 60 years, it's understandable that they might use the same story more than once. It is now 53 years since I'm Still Waiting was lifted from a Diana Ross solo album to make a number 1 single. It was done on the advice of Tony Blackburn who persuaded Talma Motown to do so. You may have heard Tony tell the story on the radio. I'd be surprised if you hadn't. But he was right because schmaltz though it might be, it is a masterpiece of childhood heartbreak and evokes the summer of 71 like nothing else, 

              once again alone
Like a child without her playmate
I had to face the truth
I was still in love with you
But you said:

Little girl
Please don't wait for me
Wait patiently for love
Someday it will surely come

 

Some groups are revealed as only ever a vehicle for the talent or ambition of one of them but the Supremes did well enough when reverting to that original name without Miss Ross after she left them, and collateral damage, behind her on her way to iltimate diva status. She was not the greatest singer but she was, as Berry Gordy's flagship glamour girl at Motown, the girl most likely given her commitment to her own cause and Berry's quality control department, which was him, giving her the best songs.

Neither Mick or Keith can be said to have been successful as solo artists but the Stones were such a brand that they didn't need to be. George outgrew Wham!; Lionel Ritchie was bigger on his own than he'd been as a Commodore, the likes of T. Rex and Simply Red were only ever Marc Bolan and Mick Hucknall and some session men but the most hilarious decision to jettison the band and be a star in one's own right was surely Ali Campbell, leaving UB40 after maybe 35 years. It didn't noticeably work.

Melancholy and Marriage

 The prolific and ever-reliable Anecdotal Evidence has taken as its text The Anatomy of Melancholy the last couple of days, sounding quite Johnsonian as it does as well as being the only thing the good doctor said got him out of bed two hours earlier than he would otherwise have got up.

It's one of that legion of books from university reading lists that I didn't read at the time but ought to catch up with now. In this case, though, I don't think I had to read it because my C17th Lit offering was a dissertatioon on Marvell. You might think there would be plenty of secondhand copies from ex-students who saw no point in hanging on to a 1400 page book they had hardly looked at but there aren't. I can't imagine how graduates can so readily dispose of their books once they've cobbled together their 2:2 and secured employment in a call centre but many seem to. I'd have thought the object of going to university to read one's best subject was very much to enjoy the books, Vanity Fair notwithstanding, but plenty get unloaded.

Not Robert Burton, though. I don't think many bought it in the first place. There are some extracts from it in the first volume of the weighty Oxford Anthology of English Literature that was mandatory in the first year and so I'll look at them. I don't want an abridged version, though, it's all or nothing so I'll see how it goes.

Meanwhile, The Marriage Portrait confirms Maggie O'Farrell as a 'proper writer', one who takes the reader vividly into the experience of her world. Or, the world of Lucrezia, the young Duchess of Ferrara. A proper writer does much more than put the words on the page, they apply them like Vermeer applies paint. I summarily refute the definition of poetry as a 'heightened' form of language when such a definition does nothing to differentiate it from such prose as this. It's as alive as her description of the tiger in its cage 'pouring itself' rather than moving and, like the young Lucrezia's art, it still gives the impression of three dimensions although it has reduced the world to two. 

The surprise hit of Hamnet was no fluke. There is plenty on the reading horizon with books respectfully waiting their turn to be called up but more Maggie will be among them, too, whether or not there's 1400 pages of Melancholy, which I understand to be funny and not all melancholic.