“The time nears when Ollie receives his clean bill of health. Each day for the past few weeks we have been jogging together in parkland, still using the leash, just to get him moving a bit faster, to warm his muscles. All this enforced proximity has finalised our bond. He has actually come up to my office and wagged his tail. He sits under my desk when I type and sometimes he licks my bare feet, which can only mean they taste nice.
Very soon the moment will arrive when his normal life returns. I am itching to slip the ring and let him go, because there are two things I have missed during the period of his confinement more than I would have imagined possible. One is watching him run. The other is walking with him, out in nature, seeing him free, and being free myself.”

From ‘Walking Ollie’, by Stephen Foster.

By Philip Larkin 1922–1985

That Whitsun, I was late getting away:
Not till about
One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday
Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out,
All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense
Of being in a hurry gone. We ran
Behind the backs of houses, crossed a street
Of blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence
The river’s level drifting breadth began,
Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet.

All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept
For miles inland,
A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept.
Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and
Canals with floatings of industrial froth;
A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped
And rose: and now and then a smell of grass
Displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth
Until the next town, new and nondescript,
Approached with acres of dismantled cars.

At first, I didn’t notice what a noise
The weddings made
Each station that we stopped at: sun destroys
The interest of what’s happening in the shade,
And down the long cool platforms whoops and skirls
I took for porters larking with the mails,
And went on reading. Once we started, though,
We passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls
In parodies of fashion, heels and veils,
All posed irresolutely, watching us go,

As if out on the end of an event
Waving goodbye
To something that survived it. Struck, I leant
More promptly out next time, more curiously,
And saw it all again in different terms:
The fathers with broad belts under their suits
And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat;
An uncle shouting smut; and then the perms,
The nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes,
The lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres that

Marked off the girls unreally from the rest.
Yes, from cafés
And banquet-halls up yards, and bunting-dressed
Coach-party annexes, the wedding-days
Were coming to an end. All down the line
Fresh couples climbed aboard: the rest stood round;
The last confetti and advice were thrown,
And, as we moved, each face seemed to define
Just what it saw departing: children frowned
At something dull; fathers had never known

Success so huge and wholly farcical;
The women shared
The secret like a happy funeral;
While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared
At a religious wounding. Free at last,
And loaded with the sum of all they saw,
We hurried towards London, shuffling gouts of steam.
Now fields were building-plots, and poplars cast
Long shadows over major roads, and for
Some fifty minutes, that in time would seem

Just long enough to settle hats and say
I nearly died,
A dozen marriages got under way.
They watched the landscape, sitting side by side
—An Odeon went past, a cooling tower,
And someone running up to bowl—and none
Thought of the others they would never meet
Or how their lives would all contain this hour.
I thought of London spread out in the sun,
Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat:

There we were aimed. And as we raced across
Bright knots of rail
Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss
Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail
Travelling coincidence; and what it held
Stood ready to be loosed with all the power
That being changed can give. We slowed again,
And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled
A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.

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East Anglian Landscape, Winterton-on-Sea

The ensuing post-race analysis turned into a post-mortem and rather took on the atmosphere of a wake. Presenter Clare Balding, who had earlier impartially twitted: Every time I think about the reality of the Queen winning the Derby I get a rush of nerves/butterflies/adrenalin. This is why I love my job could scarcely prevent herself from blubbing at the iniquity of the outcome. And then she had to interview the winning connections, a gig which normally lasts a minute but to which she devoted two whole seconds, and then she had to oversee the presentation of the trophy at which she did a terrific impression of a lady in waiting trying not to throw her breakfast up. As they re-ran the tape pundits queued up to explain to us poor baffled loyal subjects what the hell had happened – the Queen’s horse had been forced to run wide because of the path that it took! Those dastardly French, except: Pour Moi had run even wider while Barzelona took a look at the place and both horse and rider were always behind Carlton House until the moment it mattered. How they had managed to impede the royal animal from there was totally unfathomable. In the end Willie Carson summed the whole scandal up. ‘I have to admit it,’ he said, ‘…sadly, the best horse won.’

It was by a distance the most craven sports coverage I have ever seen, disrespectful of a magnificent sporting performance and disrespectful to a field of twelve further animals, jockeys, trainers, connections, the lot. The name of the second horse was never once mentioned – Treasure Beach (25/1) was relegated to a silent footnote in the narrative of the whole tawdry fix.

Second Century Roman Statue of Dionysus, after a Hellenistic Model