Solid Gold

To tell the truth, I am not a mad racing man, nor has betting much bothered me. Down the years I was dispatched often enough by the Guardian (then drearily prudish about racing) to keep an eye on the classics (as well as, I fancy, on the appetites and expenses of its wonderful, unappreciated racing writer Richard Baerlein) and found myself regularly caught up in the tizz and fizz of it all. And I’ve enjoyed always some of the sport’s other writers of info and grandeur, from Jack Leach, Lord Oaksey and Brough Scott, to the Spec’s own surreptitious star in the hedge at the morning gallops, Robin Oakley. But a Cheltenham man I am. As a boy, National Hunt’s high-days’ holiday and harbinger of spring was, to all intents, our local point-to-point. My pa took me first in 1946 when I was eight — dear old days when Chelt in March was a sort of Cotswold countryman’s cup final, all working tweeds and gumboots, and brown trilbies or ratcatcher caps. Now it is an immense hospitality binge where the townee world and his wife (and mistress) get as sponsored as newts in a vast encampment of candy-striped flouncy marquees. Some brandied businessmen and their millineried molls sit sniggering in them all day, barely bothering to watch the races even on television. As for the traffic …it’s logjam for miles around. That scribbling jockey William Cobbett had no remote knowledge of ‘corporate hospitality’, yet a good 170 years ago the gruff old rural rider prophesied pretty well spot-on: ‘Cheltenham on race day is the resort of the lame and the lazy, the gourmandising and the guzzling, the bilious and the nervous….’