On Cheltenham, On Not Having Covid, On Harriet and Boris

I was on the lash last week - not noisily or obnoxiously so but nonetheless I was consumed by gambling and alcohol for the final three days of the Cheltenham Festival. I was in profit on the gambling front, again not obnoxiously so but enough for my self-respect. Which was nice.

Our group of cheerful punters was at the course itself only on the Wednesday. On Thursday we took up residence in the Gate public house in Sutton Codfield. Not least of the advantages of this arangement (never mind the numerous screens showing the sport) was that a round of beers was only slightly more than the cost of a single pint on-course. Similarly advantageous was the attendance at Aston Manor Cricket Club for Gold Cup Day on Friday. 

Still crowded. Still expensive

It was actually with some trepidation that I headed to Cheltenham on the Wednesday. Don't get me wrong, it is, notwithstanding the dilution of the quality consequent upon the addition of a fourth day (and yes I know that ship has sailed, but please don't get me started on the possibility of a fifth day), a fine day's racing but the course has gradually become a less congenial place. Too crowded, too expensive (£7.50 for a pint - really) and thronged with overdressed men and underdressed women. And you pay more than a hundred of your English pounds for the privilege. I went in full expectation of declaring this my last visit to the Festival. Well, I must say I was pleasantly surprised. It was still crowded and expensive but it felt mildly less oppressive than of late. The official attendance figures confirm that the attendance was down on last year so perhaps our ruined economy is a cloud with a silver lining for elderly drunken gamblers. Will I be back next year? The jury's out.  

A much cheaper place to back winners (and losers)

As for the Gate. Proper old boozer. Proper old drinkers. Bring your own food. Good beer. Not crowded. Cheap. Will we be back? Yes.

Not salubrious. Answers the needs of the day

I have always found Gold Cup Day a hard card from which to pick winners - and that's saying quite something for a serial loser like me. The annual bash at Aston Manor (very busy but you can lean on the bar - not an option at the course) is as congenial a way of doing your bollocks (as we like to put it) as can be imagined. £5 in which included a top-grade buffet (excellent samosas), beer not as good as the Gate but way cheaper than the course. Will we be back? Yes.

I came away from my exposure to beer and betting with a cold. Covid? No - for reasons I won't bore you with, I've done a test.

That braggadocious grifter Boris Johnson was yesterday offering his pathetic evidence to the Commons Privileges Committee. I won't bore you with the details because I've been over this ground before. Suffice to say that this expensively educated and bright man asks us to believe that he learned nothing from the briefings he himself led during the Covid crisis. As I say, pathetic. That his inquisition was chaired by the catastrophically pious Harriet Harman might have made me lean in favour of any other witness but, and you won't hear me say this again I suspect, I'm on Harriet's side for once.

    

Sun And Strewn Seaweed

I thought maybe you'd like to be kept up-to-date with the weather and associated matters here on the island. And while I'm at it, yes thank you I'm getting to grips with poor old Walter Bagehot's alleged scientific racism. One should not, of course, minimise these things but I can honestly bring myself to forgive him and not lose any more sleep over it. I hope you will believe me when I say that I really did have some misgivings.

Anyway, the weather. Reports from back in Brum confirm that they have had a shit-load of snow (that's a climatological term - I've got Geography A Level you know) but, despite some flurries, nothing has settled here on the coast. I did however pull back the curtains this morning to the stunning sight of the Great Orme snow-clad on the horizon. I took myself down to the beach where things were a deal calmer than yesterday - one could actually get down to the beach-front. I took a photo, intending to put it up as a comparator to yesterday's but unfortunately I find that a quarter of the picture is taken up by my unfocused finger. Sorry. I was going to take a further picture of the piles of seaweed that had been cast onto the road in the storm but by the time I came out of the cafe (Americano and a nice piece of carrot cake) some efficient soul had cleared it away. Such efficiency might even make me feel sanguine about the licensed larceny that is our penal Council Tax, assuming always that it was a public servant who had done the cleaning-up.

Another film a - very good one. The Killing Fields relates a true story within the context of America's dubious history in Cambodia. The structure of the film is risky - the first narrative arc concerns the build-up to the shambolic vacating of the country by the West. The second arc largely (and you might think riskily) abandons its American and European protagonists in favour of a chilling depiction of the Khmer Rouge regime that filled the power vacuum. Powerful and important. 83/100.       

Ooooo, Big Waves

 

I'm no photographer but I snapped this image this morning down at the seafront in Benllech. Pretty cool eh? The prevailing winds mean that Benllech is generally a sheltered bay, but not today. I was half-way down the steps to the front and could venture no further - I even got an uplifting dousing in the sea-spray when a particulrly large wave crashed over the wall. Delicious.

As you will have gathered, I am here in Ynys Mon. I study best here and have been trying to get to grips with  the notion that Walter Bagehot was a nasty old racist. I won't bore you with the story but someone brighter than I am, put this notion in my head so it has to be tested. It troubles me, most notably in the context of Bagehot's Physics and Politics. I am reading a contentious tome that glories in the title, The Victorian Reinvention of Race: New Racisms and the Problem of Grouping in the Human Sciences, by Edward Beasley. He really has it in for my boy Walter. We all do it I know but Beasley ends up being reductivist. He is a better and more elegant writer than the Big Fat Pig but The Pig is nonetheless trying to mount a defence of the Boy Bagehot and, in the process, to rescue his doctoral thesis from the flames of redundancy. This is not simple when you are facing an opening paragraph as lucid (and thereby attractive) as Beasley's:

To classify the peoples of the world, we sometimes invent races. What I mean is that we cut the human continuum into discrete groups, each with a bilogical identity that we think of as passed down from one generation to the next.

Beasley goes on to throw Bagehot into the circle of Hell occupied by the French brute Gobineau. Check him out if you have a minute. Walter deserves better. 

Let us move to a more comfortable environment. I've been watching films again. This time it was something of a curiosity - The Sisters Brothers (available on iPlayer if you fancy it) - a beautifully mounted Western set in mid 1850s Oregon and California. I say it is a curious film because it has a lot going for it but somehow it fails to fire. Three of its four principal characters are played by Hollywood heavyweights. John C. Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix, and Jake Gyllenhaal are all excellent and matched by the not quite so stellar Riz Ahmed. All well and good. But somehow the movie can't make up its mind whether it is Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or Unforgiven. The truth, I'm sure, is that it wants to be neither but to be itself. It is good but, in the end, the weight of the venerable genre pulls it down and it manages to be a good film from which a great one wants to escape. Its wistful ending is worth the effort. 66/100. Interesting to note that it attracted good reviews but bombed at the box office. 

 

A Film You First Saw Way Back When

Kramer v Kramer is a film from those days when the Groupie and I were unencumbered by children (that sounds cruel but you know what I mean) and therefore regular visitors to the cinema. Those, also, were the days before streaming services so if you wanted to see a film, you went to the cinema or waited years for it to be shown (cropped and mangled) on terrestrial television. Kramer v Kramer seemed important and well-made back in those days and I am pleased to tell you that it still holds up now. It is carried by its acting - everyone is pitch perect, Meryl Streep and Dustin Hoffman had got previous but Justin Henry as the fought-over child is stunning. He remains the youngest ever Oscar nominee. Touching, heart-warming, moving, funny, sad, provocative. All of the above. 82/100. 

Days Of Heaven, Days Of Thunder

I sat last Friday in the bar at Royal St. David's Golf Club, Harlech, nursing (not very tenderly I would have to confess) a pint of Guinness and conversing with my great friend Big Will Macfarlane. We had just played eighteen holes in decent weather (a bit of breeze and a tad on the cold side but mercifully rain-free) on the magnificent links. I've raved about the course before but it's worth reiterating - bloody brilliant.

Anyway the point is this - from my vantage point in the bar, the door framed a view of the eighteenth green with the huge dunes in the background. I permitted myself a grin of self-satisfaction and thought, 'Days of Heaven - life's been good to me so far'. 

Not a bad back-drop

Which rather brings me round to last night as I enjoyed the bar-room joviality at Pype Hayes with my mates. We are growing old together with as little dignity as decorum permits. I had played passably well at Harlech, which fact made my dismal efforts yesterday all the harder to bear. I had felt thunderously angry towards myself but as I glanced around those jovial faces, known to me for decades from rugby and cricket fields, I thought to myself, 'Days of Thunder - life's been good to me so far'. 

Another Day, Another Film

This blog is in danger of being taken over by my estimations of various films. Sorry about that but I do watch a fair number of movies and I find the political world so tawdry that it is difficult to comment upon it. Difficult, that is, in the pain it affords me to begin thinking about it. But there is, even in my limited world, rather more than films and politics. That is true - I realise this as I type it. So never mind that latest film (of which more anon) here is a scattergun smorgasbord of what is going on in the Pig's mind.

The Conservative Party has been in power too long and its parliamentary party is stuffed full of mediocrities who never seriously thought they were going to win a seat. I once had dealings with a relatively wise man who made the arresting defence of our first-past-the-post electoral system that it produced an inevitable swings and roundabouts effect and that the variety between successive governments acted to our benefit, certainly was more desirable than some sort of proportional representation induced perma-coalition. As I think of it now, the problem has been that we had a highly conservative (note the lower case c) Prime Minister in Blair and, after a brief interlude for the temperamentally unsuited Brown, we then got another smooth indifferentist in the lazy Cameron who might as well, as it turned out, have been wearing a Blair mask. Just to spice things up the Labour Party then followed the comically useless Ed Miliband with the barking mad and unelectable Jeremy Corbyn. All of which condemned us to a succession of useless Tories, prime amongst them the clever but venal Boris. We now have Rishi Sunak who, one has to admit, does give the impression of being a clever chap but who leads the aforesaid bunch of mediocrities. And then I look at bloody Keir Starmer and I despair. We should remember just how loyally Starmer served Corbyn. I've never done it before but I am tempted to spoil my ballot next time around. Or maybe I should transfer my voting domicile to Ynys Mon (where I pen this) so that at least I can be part of a meaningful contest between Plaid and Conservatives.

So that's politics out of the way. You will gather that I might best be described as pissed-off. And I haven't even touched on world politics. Another day. No, let's move on to drink, wine to be exact. We are pleased to announce that the winner of the OG wine variety of the year is, not for the first time, Barolo. This stuff is just bloody fantastic as we oenophiles put it. As with much else (and ironic for a man who has always described himself as having the palate of a stray dog) the Pig has saddled himself with expensive taste. Oh well you can't take it with you - how's that for a tax planning strategy.

I returned to my beloved rugby union in my last post so I won't dwell. Suffice to say that there is a learned treatise to be written (I might be just the man) on the Welsh Rugby Union (and for that matter the English as well) and restraint of trade. I can feel my inner Mr Angry welling up again.

Golf. What solace this game is to me notwithstanding my fluctuation from adequacy to incompetence. This fluctuation is not from day to day but from minute to minute. No matter, I have got myself a game at Royal St. David's on Friday with my mate Big Willy. I've loaded a box of new balls into the bag in anticipation.

So at last we come to that film. Effie Gray (2015, available on iPlayer) is a curate's egg of a film. Emma Thompson's screenplay is predictably learned and acute but seems to cut off just as the story threatens a crescendo. What we do have is a neat consideration of the doomed marriage between Gray and John Ruskin. Just as she frees herself of the wretched man and his awful parents, the movie closes without so much as a signal of the later and deserved connubial bliss that the real Effie found with John Everett Millais. Perhaps Thompson had her sights on an unlikely sequel. 63/100. 

Do you know what are nice? I'll tell you: Tunnock's Caramel Wafer Biscuits, thats' what. I'm going to have one now. I went for a run this morning so I've earned it. Goodbye.

 

Six Nations 23

In the wake of England's underwhelming start to the championship I have not been motivated to get too deep into this year's Six Nations. On reflection I should have known better. There are some signs of hope for the grand old game from the first two weekends, even if the stultifying caterpillar ruck still makes the odd appearance. I won't get bogged down in the direness of this tactic but will confine myself to saying that it is the arch-signifier of precisely what can be achieved by soulless coaching.

will someone please ban this crap

England have been left in a mess by Eddie Jones. I never was a fan but now that he has gone I think we can identify his principal failing - he hates the English. We are left with a group of players conditioned to feel apologetic about who they are. That never works. 

International sport must per se be a cruel mistress and she may be playing a particularly malicious trick on poor old Owen Farrell. He has been a player on the cusp of greatness, a prime example of the solid English fly-half (as opposed to the Celtic preference for the will-o'-the-wisp) but now he looks slow and confused. At least he is now playing in his best position but if he is to be persisted with then he must be given the latitude to play his way. 

Enough of poor old England. Did you see the Ireland v France match? Now that did show the possibilities of the sport. Breathless, brutal, controversial, magnificent. Compare it to the decidedly lower division fare served up in both of week two's other games. Scotland were decidedly better than Wales (who have got themselves in a right pickle and have gone back to a man as unlikeable as Eddie Jones in the shape of Warren Gatland) but the match was littered with the sort of human error that was simply not a feature of the Dublin classic. England v Italy was also painfully second-tier stuff. I wouldn't put it past England to lose to Wales next weekend, thus once again reviving the corpse of the Welsh game. All part of life's rich pageant. But please no bloody caterpillar rucks and brain-dead box-kicking.