PETER THOMAS

Weblog:  Wandering the world wide web

There goes another mist opportunity

THE big trouble with this cold spell is that I've been watching a lot of all-weather racing over the last few days and I'm beginning to think I've got it cracked. I always worry when I start thinking that, because it usually means the boots I'm getting too big for are about to land messily in the cowpat of over-confidence.

It started on Monday, when I found a long-lost tenner in an old internet betting account and decided, not for the first time, that I'd turn it into the kind of sum that even I wouldn't be able to misplace. A mate of mine had a horse running that he told me would finish either first or last, depending on a long list of imponderables, so I decided the beast was the ideal conveyance for a scheme based almost entirely upon luck and blind faith.

As it turned out, the thing finished first, at 8-1, quickly followed the next day by a 10-1 shot and a bloodless win for Tottenham, just for ballast, and I was on my jolly way. United losing at Derby was a mere blip on the punting radar, I reasoned, and I woke this morning with confidence oozing from every pore and a wife who was upset at having to wash the sheets three days early.

Sadly, a morning poring over race videos failed to take into account the greatest misnomer in British racing, the term 'all-weather racecourse'. I'd saved my sole bet of the day for the last at Great Leighs, kept myself out of temptation's way all afternoon, and then tuned in to see Tommo talking to a long-faced Dane O'Neill about the correlation between fog-induced floodlight refraction and the increased incidence of big, dopey horses running into each other at high speed.

The conclusion was that all-weather racecourses are only all-weather in the same sense that my mother is Archbishop Desmond Tutu. At best they might be called 'most-weather' racecourses, foolproof and utterly reliable except in the incidence of excessive chilliness, too much rain, mist, fog, snow, ice or other manifestations of frozen water, all of which might reasonably be expected to occur in Essex in January. In California, they might be all-weather, but here they're something else entirely, just the same as in California an orange tree is an orange tree, whereas in Essex it's a stick.

So, my runaway scheme has been derailed temporarily. We beat the cold, and the forecast plague of locusts never turned up, but the fog got us in the end. Tomorrow, however, I shall be back, unless Lingfield proves susceptible to the worst climatic excesses of the Surrey commuter belt.