It was one of those moments when a clunking great pile-driver comes up and thuds straight into your duodenum. I can weave through the form for a 24-runner handicap at the sputtering fag end of the season. I can summon the maths to cope with a series of cross doubles at, say, 13–8, 11–4 and, please the Lord, 33–1. But faced with columns of car specifications and model numbers on the internet when buying from a garage three hours’ drive away, I am rather less use than the village idiot. Hence the moment last week when the replacement for our 13-year-old BMW arrived and I had to telephone the saintly Mrs Oakley, who had saved for it over six years, with the uncomfortable words, ‘Darling, I have, uh, bought the wrong car.’ What was supposed to be an estate-type vehicle to accommodate Mrs Oakley’s Labrador-to-be turned up as a saloon.
There have been moments to compare. Like our arrival, after a 200-mile drive, at a wedding. Mrs O. inquired, ‘And where is my hatbox?’ to meet the reply, ‘Ah, would that be the round thing I saw on the landing back in London just before we left?’ There was, too, the vertical ascent of the eyebrows as she asked one day, ‘And outside which supermarket is our dog still patiently sitting?’ as I returned home with the groceries but sans hound. Not to mention the expensive and uncooked turkey which, still in its cardboard box, erroneously made its way to the household-waste recycling site on Christmas Eve…Long-suffering she may be, but lost for words Mrs Oakley is not.
My BMW blunder is proving expensive to sort out. But, having vowed that the bookies will help with transition costs, I did not start well at Cheltenham’s Open meeting. Never bet when you need a win.
Zacharova, Venetia Williams’s six-year-old handicap chaser, looked just the one to cope with the heavy conditions in the Servo Trophy but got no further than the first fence. Pettifour disappointed as a long-distance hurdler when one of this column’s Ten to Follow last season so I backed against him in the novice chase, only for Nigel Twiston-Davies’s seven-year-old to stay on stoutly and win. Then Paul Nicholls’s Chapoturgeon looked a cinch for the big race, the Paddy Power Gold Cup, but capsized at the eighth when going well.
I was going to have a saver on Edward O’Grady’s Tranquil Sea since no Irish horse had won the race since 1980 and Edward has trained more Festival winners than any Irishman alive. Money from across the water was driving Tranquil Sea from 10–1 to 11–2 favourite. But then, of course, I told myself after the car mix-up that I was not to be trusted with statistics and lumped some more on Chapoturgeon instead. Tranquil Sea went clear, with only eight of the 16 runners completing in the wet. Don’t they say that heavy ground in Ireland means something like Venice’s Grand Canal?
Ah, well, you could not begrudge Tranquil Sea’s victory. O’Grady revealed that within days of winning his Grade One novice hurdle in 2008 the horse had been spooked by a pigeon at home. He had dumped his rider, fled and fallen, and then spent four months in his box with a suspected broken shoulder. His trainer reckoned it wasn’t the best field ever assembled for the Paddy Power and that this was his chance. ‘If there was an up-and-coming horse in the field, it was him.’ So it proved, and at least I got home without scraping the new, if temporary, car.
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