Poisson d’Avril

Trust the French to have cuisine in mind when coining their phrase for April Fool. On the front page of the Daily Telegraph of 3 April, I spotted a statistical prediction by my old rival for the British chess championship, Bill Hartston, that Seabass (a horse, not a marine delicacy) would win the Grand National. Bill’s theory, which seemed a sure thing at the time, was that according to past results, stretching back 174 years, winners would have a name of one word consisting of between seven and 11 letters and beginning with S, R, M or C. The winning horse would also be aged nine or ten. Believing in the infallibility of such an eminent ‘mathematician’ and ‘Cambridge University graduate’ as the Telegraph put it, without mentioning his distinction at chess, I placed £100 to win on Seabass, which promptly went to sleep and strolled in far behind even the generous limits permitted by an ‘each way’ punt. Seabass didn’t just get away; the horse never really got going.

My disappointment at Seabass’s failure to perform echoed an earlier encounter with a piscine dasher of mortal hopes. At the 1987 world championship between Karpov and Kasparov, a group of journalists had gathered for dinner in La Dorada restaurant in Seville.  La Dorada, which is actually Spanish for a sea bream, is not just the name of the restaurant, but the title of their signature dish — a whole fish baked in a casing of salt, to retain the juices after the salt had been cracked away. The table unanimously began ordering dorada, when, out of the corner of my eye, I observed a waiter carrying something very large and very red on a huge tray. I inquired of a Spanish friend, the well-known sports journalist Leontxo Garcia, what this might be, and he answered a ‘bogavante’.