Waiting for the Arc with a cognac an early taste of paradise

The reserve postman has spiky, steel-grey hair and plenty of it, brushed straight across and standing up slightly, though not alarmingly. With his sallow, lived-in face he is, let's be honest, a dead ringer for Samuel Beckett. Very few in Nailsea have passed comment.

He seems to have Beckett's stamina, too. I long for him to sit down on the wall for a rest. "You can't go on. You'll go on," I shall say, paraphrasing the great man. Nearly all posties are thin, wiry and indefatigable. 'As rare as a fat postman,' as Raymond Chandler put it in The Long Goodbye or one of the other Philip Marlowe private eye novels. I like to think it's The Long Goodbye because it's my favourite, especially the film version with its moody Johnny Mercer soundtrack.

This will be the first Arc I've missed for several years. I go back as far as Sea-Bird in 1965 and, while I find comparisons between outstanding champions of different generations fairly pointless, I shall never see a better middle-distance horse than Sea-Bird.