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DAVID CARR |
Weblog: What do you mean the Wi-Fi doesn't work? The life of a Racing Post reporter
So long and thank you for all the quotes
Quite a melancholy day today - and not just because I was stuck inside doing briefings while the sun shone outside.
The turf season ends tomorrow and phoning for quotes on the November Handicap meeting at Doncaster involved a lot of semi-tearful farewells.
Many of those trainers we have been pestering all summer won't get a call now until March. And who knows where we will all be then? People might even have stopped talking about the whip. Though I doubt it.
One moment of bizarre comedy among the last-day-of-term emotion.
"Hello."
"Hello, can I speak to name of trainer?"
"Who is that?"
"It's David Carr from the Racing Post."
"No, I know who you are. Who is it at the door?"
"?"
Pause. "Oh. I'll get the trainer for you."
Of course, the hundred and plenty runners ploughing through the mud in eight impossible-to-crack races are not the only attraction tomorrow, with many of my unfortunate colleagues forced to forego Doncaster and slumming it in Kentucky instead.
The Breeders' Cup, a meeting so prestigious it has two official cocktails - the 'down the stretch' (vodka, lemon-lime soda, cranberry juice, sweet and sour mix and blue curacao) and the 'Zenyatta' (vodka, le citron, pink lemonade and mint).
Could be just the thing to ward off the cold and damp at Kelso tomorrow - though Isuspect a bowl of hot soup might be more welcome than a highball glass full of ice.
Now, I know that the last thing you want from me is a tip. Particularly one passed on from a trainer.
But Ferdy Murphy could not have been more insistent in the way he urged me to keep an eye on the 'very nice' Ibn Hiyyan in the last race at Kelso - a one-time $400,000 purchase running off a mark of just 96 in a £4,000 handicap hurdle.
David Carr: raising funds
So I thought I had better pass it on.
If it does go in and you can't think of anywhere to put your winnings, there are many worse things to do than making a donation at http://mobro.co/davidcarr - every penny will be going to an extraordinarily worthwhile cause. One for which my face is a billboard this month, as you can see.
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