Makemeadiva’s tip below was one of those miracles that come along once in a rare happy while: horses that drift from 33s to 100/1 do not tend to do a lot of winning. I hope some of you got on. (And if you’d have followed the whole comment you’d have seen that she gave the second a good mention too – the animal came in at 66s. That would have returned £3000 on a forecast to a one pound stake. In fact, I’m wondering if makemeadiva is in Barbados now…)

I am off tomorrow. The blog’s tip is anything with Diva in the name, otherwise I fancy a sentimental e/w bet on War of Attrition in the World Hurdle: his trainer Mouse Morris is a proper character and the horse is a big price for an ex-Gold Cup winner who is having a splendid twilight season. He is owned by the Ryanair bloke, but to weigh against that the silks are a nice burgundy colour.

Good luck!

Mouse Morris, Gold Cup winning trainer

Cheltenham was somewhat torrid today what with them waiting until the last race before allowing a favourite to win. That horse’s name did begin with a Q, however, which qualified it under one of my emergency backing ’systems’ a system that is unconnected with the form book- the ‘Q is a lucky letter’ system. I had a winner in the weekend’s big race under this policy.

Now, as the above has proved that form is not the be all and end all, the blog is happy to advise diverting the end of day attention away from Cheltenham tomorrow, making a sidestep to quiter pastures just off the A14 and making a small investment in the last race at Huntingdon on a tip that has come in from proper racing blogee (one who can still find time to study Huntingdon while Cheltenham is on) – makemeadiva. The suggestion has come in on the ‘By Request’ 99 red balloons post below and is for an animal called Theredballoon in the 5.30, a race entitled (to keep the red part going) the ‘32red.com Standard Open Nh Flat Race.’ The animal is currently advertised at ‘carpet’ – 33/1 – which is a golden price for longshots.

You know it makes sense.

Nb: if you ever find yourself feeling a bit flat after losing a little during this event, one way of cheering yourself up is to head across to the sportinglife.com website to take a look at the ‘full results’ lists in the racing section (on the sidebar). Here you will find that while you lost £2.50 e/w and ten pound on the nose, some individual (in today’s first) lost 25 grand on third placed hotpot, Dunguib.

The great joy of it all begins tomorrow as the nation skives off four glorious days of punting. Meanwhile here’s a picture of one that’s awkward to saddle and ‘has his own thoughts about the game,’ this being one of racing commentary’s standby expressions which translates to either a) animal is a nutter or b) animal has downed tools for a graze of the track. The blog is saying Dunguib in the first, though this is hardly original, with maybe a little e/w cover on Flat Out at 16/1. We will be back with some juicy prices throughout the week once the stars are in proper alignment.

after an emotional weekend in S-o-T, but I am not quite tired enough not to have to say how irritating that BT ad family are becoming. As I lay on a cushion feeling wan this evening I found that I am now being required to engage with the birth father of the children. We have never seen this chap before, for all we know he was dead, but now he has been bought in like an emergency plot device in Dynasty. The girl informs this father on the ‘BT dedicated ooh aren’t land lines so great for keeping up with your absent kids’ line that her Mam is to be marrying ‘Adam.’ I don’t know this bloke from Adam. The father looks so shocked – my God, the ex I never think about is doing something; meanwhile the Mother involuntarily spits out her wine as she hears the girl give away the amazing revelation to a walk-on from central casting. NO ONE CARES, NO ONE HAS EVER CARED. YOU’RE ALL JUST ACTORS FROM SOMETHING NO ONE CAN EVEN REMEMBER.

Note: has the Mam never seen the ad about the hazards of drinking wine, about how it makes you look like you’re being x-rayed and how it causes all your hair and teeth to fall out?

* Hangs up *

I’ve got the feeling some strange energy is going through the ley-line of the blog:

Tomorrow, after Stoke City have walloped the Villa, we celebrate the venerable birthday of Old Stokie at a Chinese restaurant in Newcastle-under-Lyme. A number 69 for me with egg-fried rice please. As I was saying to Ben the Hat only yesterday, this following is a desert island disc for me. ‘Punk.’ I intoned most pseudishly, ‘Was about 45rpm singles.’ This single was ace, in its recorded version. Finding a tuneful live performance is somewhat of a challenge, however; the harmful elements in the air here are mainly the vocal sounds of Siouxsie Sioux. It’s mercifully brief and if you can get through it there’s some ’seminal’ dancing at the end. And you can’t say she don’t look good though.

Testimonial, as supplied by ‘”Old” Stokie’

On Destruction:

The count up to yet is my stair carpet (which was knackered anyway and needs replacing), a piece taken out of the hearth rug, my mobile phone charger which I stupidly left plugged in where he could get to it, the handle of the video camera bag which I stupidy left where he could get to it, 1 scarf, 1 shoe and a plastic brush and pan. And that’s just in my house. At his own home, he’s chewed the corners off the skirting boards and demolished umpteen of the kids’ toys. That’s not bad. My daughter once had two dogs (against my advice) and left them at home while she and hubby went to work. They demolished a whole kitchen. They really did, including the plaster off the walls! Jasper’s a good boy.

Yesterday’s post reminded me of sitting in lecture rooms in the afternoons trying to decipher the thoughts of this Bulgarian-born French-based specialist in semiotics, Maoism and feminism:

The following is from: Revolution in Poetic Language, New York, 1984 (originally published as La Revolution du Language Poétique, Paris, 1974). [The very thought of all this has slipped me back into a correct footnoting style]

Our philosophies of language, embodiments of the idea, are nothing more than the thoughts of archivists, archaeologists and necrophiliacs. Fascinated by the remains of a process which is partly discursive, they substitute this fetish for what actually produced it. Egypt, Babylon, Mycanae: we see their pyramids, their carved tablets, and fragmented codes in the discourse of our contemporaries, and think that by codifying them we can possess them…

Kristeva is interested in reclaiming thoughts and ideas and re-siting them; she is interested in the spaces between the lines. I found her actual writing a kind of abstract poetry. Sometimes I liked it, sometimes it Zenned me out into a stupor, but it’s interesting that words connected up into ideas have the power to do that … Let me know if you want more, and if you want less, tomorrow I may post a photograph of a Jack Russell.

Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963 – 1995

Tracey Emin

I suddenly had the thought that this blog is a bit phallocentric (when I first heard that word at Art School I thought it was something they had made up) in it’s representation of art. I’m not totally sure that I’m going to have a Female Artists Week as that seems a bit ‘list-y’ and lists are no doubt a symbol of subjugative phallocentric thinking: everything numbered 1-10 ought to constitute a reproach to the male psyché; (after my first term in art school I could no longer roll a cigarette without the act of shaping it forming the suggestion of gender suppression in my febrile mind).

Helen Chadwick was an artist I loved because she seemed quite rude but the pieces she made were rather compelling. These sculptures – piss flowers, as they are titled – below were typical of her style. To do what comes naturally in snow and make bronze casts of it: what could be greater and more simple? Or perhaps not so simple, how would you make that cast anyway – from what?

Helen Chadwick’s boyfriend contributed to the process – in the final pieces it is his efforts that end up looking like the female parts and vice-versa due to the different urinating techniques.

To explain this in a more sophisticated terminology, here is a very ’soft’ example of the sort of language I encountered when I first came across ‘art writing’ -

The pleasure of a taboo act exalted through the object, their flower pistils cast from the cavities melted in the snow by hot urine, strong and warm from the woman, diffuse and cooler from the man, are an inversion of human genitalia. The central female form is penile, the male labial.

Piss Flowers, 1991-92, painted bronzes

The M11 was closed due to an accident which threw our whole day out by about an hour. Once in the capital I couldn’t really understand London’s Sunday roads – it was just as busy as a weekday (nearly). In combination, these two factors meant that we abandoned the car outside the Ritz at 15.33. I was carrying three extra tickets for mates who were waiting on me outside the away end for the 16.00 kick-off which gave the whole thing an element of 007. We took the Piccadilly Line to Earls Court where we changed to the the District Line to Fulham Broadway and legged it to the ground. Seven stops and we were inside the Shed Upper just five minutes after kick-off which wasn’t too bad considering there was no helicopter involved.

On the return it was sardines at Fulham Broadway; the train was no place for claustrophobics or defeated Stoke fans, though I was in a fairly good mood (I never expected to win and there had been a lot of jolly singing to John Terry to keep us warm – Are you my dad, are you my dad, John Terry, Are you my dad? etc). I spoke to several Chelsea fans who were squeezed up against me closer than John Terry to a barmaid to ask where they were headed. The answers were Sevenoaks, Chelmsford and so on, as you’d expect – gloryhunters from no-team towns. On the change to the eastbound Piccadilly we were asked by a cheeky-faced kid what the score had been. Graham, who was travelling with me (and who, in a moment of Esprit de l’Escalier, later noted that he should have said ‘5-0 to Stoke’) started to explain. As he got to describing the second goal the kid unzipped his anorak to reveal a Chelsea top saying, ‘I know, I was there!’

‘Haha, cheeky-faced kid,’ we all said.

We were at Gloucester Road now. I asked the kid where he was going. ‘Bedford.’ he replied. ‘Where are you off to?’ he asked.
‘The Ritz,’ I said, ‘We’ve got a suite and some chilled champagne waiting for us back there.’ (I had had a few moments to think of this).
‘That’s where Michael Jackson dangled the baby from the window, isn’t it?’ he said.
‘I don’t think so.’ I said, ‘I think that was in Paris.’

But the kid was adamant that this had happened in London. I had nothing more to say on the matter. I looked at the boy – he was about twelve year’s old with tight-cut hair, very handsome; with an afro he might have done well in a ‘young Micheal Jackson look-a-like’ contest. I asked him if he liked Michael Jackson.

‘He was okay,’ he said. ‘But I think he was too close to children.’
‘Mm Hmm,’ I said.
We discussed Jackson’s earlier songs with the Jackson 5, of which we were both fans. The kid liked Rockin’ Robin best of all. I preferred Looking Through the Window.
‘He spoiled it all really,’ the kid said at last, ‘With the Podofolic stuff.’
‘Is that a word?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ the kid said, ‘But you know what I mean.’

Indeed I did. And now we had come to Green Park, where we alighted. I had left the car unlocked, but nothing had been tampered with or taken.