Taking the rough with the rough

By Ian Carnaby

There is nowhere quite like Punchestown and I can still handle just about everything although, a few months short of my 60th birthday, the taxi from Blessington to Dublin Airport at 4.15am on the Friday requires a major effort of will.

One way and another it was just about the longest day of my life and it ended sadly with the loss of Lenny The Blade, about whom I wrote a couple of weeks ago. We bred him, he thought life was a grand old game, not to be taken too seriously (don’t know who he got that from) and then he started improving at seven. He won a novices’ handicap hurdle ay Newton Abbot and was about to follow up at Chepstow when falling two out. He might have survived that but another horse crashed into him and that was the end of it.

It leaves you with a numb feeling. It’s not so much that he was just starting to do what we wanted, it’s the fact that he was assured of a good home for the rest of his days. One of the syndicate made it perfectly clear that there was never any chance of going for a seller or claimer, because that would involve the risk of losing him. That was how much Lenny meant to us.

And you have to accept it and move on. As one who has gone on television and argued passionately for National Hunt racing - and all that it involves - in the face of fierce criticism following accidents at Cheltenham and Aintree, I cannot feel sickened by it just because something bad has happened to me.

Incidentally, those television debates leave you more than a little frustrated because people will not accept basic truths. I ended up saying that, if horses didn’t race, didn’t take risks imposed upon them by human beings, most of them wouldn’t be brought into the world in the first place. Given a voice, what would they choose? This so flummoxed a determined abolitionist that I might just as well have been speaking in Swahili.

On an allied subject, a man of the cloth once argued for an end to all gambling, and I enquired politely what he would do with the dole queues, given that racing is the sixth biggest industry in the country. There was no answer, of course, because that had never occurred to him, and I felt slightly guilty. He was totally opposed to the Lottery, which he said was taking people away from the church, and I should simply have remarked that some people are so oppressed that even picking up a single ticket buys a dream that lasts hours or even days. But you don’t always think quickly enough in these situations.

Malcolm Siberry is still in a critical condition in hospital

I was working at Haydock on Saturday, which is a long drive from Nailsea. Before I left, I received some of the best information that has ever come my way. I’d better not be too specific here, but let’s just say a friend relayed the news that there was very good money indeed for Ilviz in the selling hurdle at Market Rasen. That’s right. On a Saturday, with all the big stuff still to come, the bet365 card at Sandown, etc, this opener in deepest Lincolnshire was the business. Well, I played, as you do. I don’t know how far he’d have won, but he was six lengths up at the last and he wasn’t stopping. It was a dreadful, comprehensive fall and it took me a while to remove the phone from my ear and hang up quietly and go out to the car and set off. It was only later that I discovered the fall was not merely expensive but fatal. I’m not sure how many horses Ollie Pears has got that can win, but I bet there aren’t all that many. And then I thought about the owners and the high rollers. Then I tried not to think at all.

I pulled off the M5 to listen to Ungaro at Sandown and Compton’s Eleven at Leicester, although their names were hardly mentioned. At Haydock, I was guiding a party towards the parade ring when Pure Imagination got loose, tried to jump a plastic running rail and hurtled into racecourse worker Malcolm Siberry. At the time of writing, he was still in a critical condition in hospital.

There is no less superstitious a person than I. I think everything happens purely by chance, our lives are merely a succession of coincidences and astrology is the biggest pile of pants ever foisted upon the nation with the single exception of the lyrics to Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. (‘Scaramouche, Scaramouche, can you do the fandango?’ ‘Galileo, Galileo, Figaro?’ Oh, come ON.)

Even so, you might start wondering if the French have something with their ‘Jamais deux sans trois’ - never two without three. I pondered this on the long drive back to Bristol, failing narrowly to arrive at the Old Duke in time for a pint of Directors. Actually the car would probably have been broken into, as it was once before round there. Jamais trois sans quatre.

On Sunday, digesting the Championship results and realising that Southampton would probably need to beat Sheffield United on the final day to stay up, I went for a long walk with the dog. Bedminster is a funny sort of place, though, with street-wise Bristol dogs, and Yogi is happier with the more genteel Nailsea types. He’s lived a sheltered life, really.

I didn’t really want to do anything else and still felt pretty tired. But there was something about Everton v Aston Villa which just screamed ‘Draw! Draw!’ so I did it. And it was, and I turned the Ceefax off when Villa equalised for 1-1 with ten minutes left, unable to bear another disappointment, and it was just as well I did, because Everton scored again. But Villa did as well, and I was rather pleased.

Which was when I realised that, sad and tired and spent though I undoubtedly was, I really hadn’t changed very much at all. The gambler lurks in the man and makes him feel better sometimes.