Cat Racing

I have always enjoyed reading diaries and the three I have enjoyed the most are: Alan Clarke, Chips Channon and Jeffrey Bernard. Bernard’s pieces are not what you might call a diary – he would be a great blogger now if he could ever summon up the motivation to do it for nothing. I think great diaries and indeed autobiographies are best written by those who were close to the top of their chosen profession but who lacked the ruthlessness to really go for it. Very few of the greats write well of themselves because they are always trying to protect their reputation – even up to the end where the legacy becomes all.

I have just finished my annual dose of Channon and Clarke and I am currently reading some of Bernard’s last musings – ‘Reach for the Ground’. Not as good as his previous collections of which I have two but still very, very funny. Described as the longest suicide note in history he tells great stories of excess and impropriety. As a great gambler he tells a lovely story about what he and a group of friends had to do to get their gambling fix when snow had caused all of the horse-racing to be abandoned. They set the whole of an upstairs landing up of a large Battersea flat as a mini-racecourse complete with hurdles, water jumps etc. and at the end of the course they left a tin of opened salmon. At the beginning of the course they lined up a row of cats and one of them ran a book so that bets could be placed on winning cats. He tells another story of Metropolitan Police excess when they came to arrest him for running a book at the Coach and Horses pub in Soho. 12 policeman came to perform the arrest of, as he says, ‘little me’. I have met very few policemen and women in my time and with honourable exceptions I am always underwhelmed by them. But perhaps my favourite is how he came to be sacked from the Sporting Life. He was a little inebriated and was – how shall we say it – ‘unwell’ at the moment the Queen Mother was coming out of a lift and he was going into it. I believe she may have had to buy a new pair of shoes.

I am rather attracted to the world’s of shits and charlatans and I wonder why.

Song of the day: Funky Nassau – Ray Munnings