I can see a route out of this inky hell
Yesterday, the sports editor took the pickaxe from my hand, pressed a net into my sweaty, leathery palm, and told me to go catch butterflies at Cheltenham.
Ha! Little did he know that I was to turn his miserly €20 budget into a route off this inky hell.
So to the off. Crowd-sourcing is the newest trend in new journalism – the theory is that (lazy) journalists outsource tasks to a group of people through an “open call” asking for contributions. Sounds good to me.
I text everyone in my phone book from ‘Alan mechanic’ to ‘Zico’s Pizza’ looking for a tip as well as roaring into the echo chamber that is Twitter.
And after spreading yesterday’s newspaper across the kitchen table and circling any potential winners in red biro, like JR Hartley looking for his out-of-print fly-fishing books in that classic Yellow Pages TV advert of yesteryear, I went for Peddlars Cross.
In these straitened times, our budget, like everything else has been reeled in from last year’s €50. So a modest €2 flutter on the Jason Maguire jockeyed horse in the Neptune Investment Novices Hurdle was enough to wet my beak. Amazingly, he came in and the off-the-shelf misery-dripping intro I usually use was thrown over my shoulder, with a loud guffaw, into the waste paper basket.
My brother’s namesake Davy Russell was next up for me on Weapons Amnesty at 2.40. If I’d known he was owned by budget airline boss Michael O’Leary, I might have checked my slip for extra charges and brought my own bottled water with me. But nevertheless he romped (as they only seem to say in tabloids and horse racing) to victory. Another Ryanair arrival on time, despite a bumpy enough ride. That’s €21 in winnings to add to the €16 earlier. Not quite enough in the kitty yet to perform a well-rehearsed resignation speech on the sports desk, but we’re going in the right direction.
These race meetings are a time when peasant is cheek by jowl with royalty in the queue for the portaloos behind the champagne tent. So then to the regal sounding Kalahari King. A €1.50 each way stake brought in the princely sum of €3.19. Why bother? But then came the redemption for every reader and our own Ruby on Sanctuaire. A still conservative €2.50 each way topped up a good day’s work as I grabbed the chips off the table, tipping my head back and laughing.
However, if you know your 1970s film history, you’ll know Papillon and his accomplice are double crossed by the butterfly dealer. Papillon’s only reward for hard work and ingenuity is betrayal and disappointment.
So I too expected the final fence of the day – the Weatherbys Champion Bumper at 5.15 – to see my final pick failing to place. But as Henri ‘Papillon’ Charriere showed: try, try again. We tried again with Ruby on Al Ferof. He was beaten to second, but another €9 saw us top out the day on €46.51.
Mugs 2 Bookies 0.
Tomorrow, Clever Claffey gets another chance to make hay.
