Walking With Richard Dunwoody
I should say that at the moment, I’m to use a horse term, lame.
I trod on a razorshell on Holkham Beach and the doctor had to remove it. Because of the discomfort, I’ve been holding my lower leg muscles tight and now they’ve all seized up.
Yesterday, I contributed to Richard Dunwoody’s 1000 Mile Charity fund and felt that it would be a good idea to go and support him and perhaps walk a mile.
Richard Dunwoody on the Bury Road
As I suspected it would, my leg did seize up badly, but I did finish.
I asked Richard whether on not he would do this again. He said that it was very boring doing the same half mile of the Bury Road! At least he’s less than twenty four hours to go.
It was all rather poignant for me, in that my late wife used to swim and run every morning from the Bedford Lodge Hotel. If she had still been with us, she would have probably done two miles with Richard every morning.
I’ll be seeing Richard again, when he completes the walk by walking down the racecourse this afternoon.
There’s still time to contribute.
Newmarket July Meeting – Day 2
Today is the second day of the Newmarket July Meeting. I’m not going, but I’m still doing the PlacePot.
- 13:30 – Kite Wood, Free Agent
- 14:00 – Arcano, Orpen Grey
- 14:35 – Class is Class, Firebet, Aqwaal
- 15:10 – Duncan, Campanogist
- 15:45 – Sabii Sands, Swilly Ferry, Farmer Giles
- 16:20 – Cloudy Start, Loch Linnie
Let’s hope I do better than yesterday.
I didn’t!
I only got the 15:10 wrong, but that was spectacularly wrong in that my selections filled the last two places.
Newmarket July Meeting – Day 1
Today is the first day of the Newmarket July Meeting. The weather won’t be as nice as it has been, but I think I’ll take the Lotus.
Here’s my PlacePot for the day.
- 13:30 – Cumana Bay, Balaagha
- 14:00 – Shamwari Lodge, Run for the Hill
- 14:35 – Capercaillie, Habaayib
- 15:10 – Goldikova, Spacious, Rainbow View
- 15:45 – Emerald Commander, Liquid Asset
- 16:20 – Beauchamp Xerxes, Manifest, Reportage
My late wife was a dab hand at PlacePots! Over a year she always won something.
I’ll post the honest results later.
- 13:30 – 1 place
- 14:00 – Nothing
- 14:35 – Nothing
- 15:10 – 2 places
- 15:45 – Nothing
- 16:20 – 1 place
A complete disaster.
But then if I’d got it right I’d have won £1965.20 for a pound stake. As I only bet at 10 pence a line, this would mean I’d have won £196.52 for each one. These are very high dividends as a lot of the placed horses were outsiders.
I’ll try again tomorrow.
Golf Clubs
I bought my son, who works in Manchester, a golf club for his birthday. Some I noticed cost about £500 and I couldn’t see any difference between those and the ones at a hundred pounds or so.
But what do I know about golf?
At least with real tennis everybody uses the same basic rackets.
Federer Roddick and a Lotus Elan
As I left Suffolk yesterday at the same time as the Wimbledon Final started. It was a lovely day for a drive in the Lotus with the top down and I sped up the A1 to see my old boss in York. I’d actually worked for him at ICI and I’ve known him since before our first child was born, almost forty years ago.
The A1 has been improved over the last year or so and I made Doncaster in just over the two hours, when before all the roundabouts had gone, it used to take two hours and a quarter. You wouldn’t have thought, that just removing these five bottlenecks would have improved things so much. But then you would sometimes wait for perhaps up to ten minutes at either the Gamston or Worksop junctions. Now you just sped through.
I should say a bit about my transport.
I always describe my Lotus Elan as the second best car in the world. That is not an arrogant claim, as in many terms, now as the car approaches it’s late middle-age, it is maturing like an old bottle of wine.
My late wife bought the car new in 1991 to travel to courts all over East Anglia in her work as a barrister and somehow it never got sold as she replaced it first with an Audi A4 Avant Quattro, a Mercedes sports car, a Mini and finally a Porsche Boxster.
When she died, it was sell the the three year-old Boxstern or the sixteen year-old Lotus. It was no contest. As the guy who services my cars, said after driving the Lotus back from it’s MOT, if you gave him the choice, he’d take the Lotus too. He wondered if anything handled so well?
I suppose an Elise does and my wife did try one. But as she tended to wear a skirt most days for work, an Elise is a no-no, as a lady can’t get out of one in a skirt, without showing all and sundry to passers-by. It will be interesting to see what the new Evora is like. I can afford one, but whether I want to spend over £55,000 on a car is another matter.
But knowing Lotus, I might get seduced at some time.
In my rules on what is the best car, you can’t judge it as of now. So if you think that your car is best, what will it be like when it is twenty years old, has nearly 110,000 miles on the clock. Will it still perform in the same way as it did, when you first bought it?
The Lotus does. Last summer, I let her (Lotuses or should it be Loti are all female) loose on the German autobahn. You’d be stuck in a queue of traffic doing seventy or so and there’d be some German hard on your bumper, flashing you to get over. (It is actually not a good idea to do that to any Lotus, as when they stop, they stop a hell of a lot faster than most cars and totally under control.) When the traffic cleared, it was just a matter of flooring the throttle and the car behind was left standing. Usually I’d pull over into the slow lane after a mile or so, as I don’t want to trash the engine. (I suspect I won’t incidentally! Like most Lotus engines they are tuned just as much for reliability, than power!) My tormentor would pass after a minute or so, with a German version of “What’s the fuck’s that?” on his face.
But perhaps where the Lotus is so different to other cars, is that drive anywhere and heads turn. Admittedly mine is Norfolk Mustard in colour, but what other car that is a twenty year-old design does that? I once remember a Lamborghini P400 Miura doing that in the 1960s in Oxford Street. But then that was possibly the noisiest car ever made.
So there are two things in my life, that I will protect with everything; my Rolex and my Lotus.
I stopped at York for tea with my ex-boss and his wife, admired their lovely garden and then set off over the Pennines towards Blackpool. Incidentally I filled up with petrol at York and the Lotus had averaged just over 31 miles per gallon. Not bad for a sports car, that hadn’t been driven for economy on the way up. I’d done the 171 miles from my home in two hours forty minutes, which is perhaps about twenty minutes faster than the last time I drove to York for the races. But then we’re back to the A1 roundabouts.
As I started off for Blackpool, Federer and Roddick, were still at it and it was 3-all in the fifth set. They were still at it, as I skirted Leeds. As I left the centre of Bradford on my way towards Keithley and Colne, the good weather was holding and the Lotus was still top down, but Roddick had finally succumbed.
What a match!
I was pleased though that Federer won, as he is such a gent and he deserves to beat the record of Grand Slams.
Will Murray ever get one? Probably! But nothing in this life is certain. Don’t I as a widower just know it?
If there is one problem with the Lotus, it is rain.
There I was driving through Colne in the sunlight and all of a sudden, just as I was about to join the M58, it started to rain. And it wasn’t drizzle.
Luckily, I was able to put the car into a side street within about twenty seconds, so I didn’t get that wet. And remember too, that to put up the hood on a Lotus is possibly the fastest of any car. You do need to get out, pull one handle, lift the roof from under the hard cover, throw it forward, jump in and click the latches. Usually, I can do it in a third of the time, it takes one of those fully electric jobs.
I didn’t get as wet as I might have!
Finally at the allotted hour of eight, I pulled up outside the hotel in Blackpool.
It had been a drive that I won’t forget. And all because of two modern and civilised gladiators.
An Interview with Bernie Ecclestone
There is a revealing interview with Bernie Ecclestone in The Times today.
Bernie Ecclestone, the Formula One chief, said yesterday that he preferred totalitarian regimes to democracies and praised Adolf Hitler for his ability to “get things done”.
He might have done but if you have read Adam Tooze’s book, The Wages of Destruction, about the economic history of the Nazis like I have, you may have a different view to Mr. Ecclestone.
The comments on The Times web site on the whole are hostile.
But if there is a problem that he can do something about it is Formula One. I like it on the television and am old enough to remember the greatest Formula One drive of all when the great Stirling Moss in an underpowered Lotus, outdrove three Ferraris at Monaco.
I went to Spa last year and to say it is boring for those that pay a lot of money to see it is an understatement. Organisation and commentaries were bad and we were very much left in the dark with what happened at the end, when Lewis Hamilton won and was then disqualified.
Compare that with the sort of service you get at horse racing at a gaff track like Yarmouth.
Godfrey Rampling
This is an interesting obituary in today’s Telegraph of Godfrey Rampling, who has died at a 100.
He was considered one of the finest one-lap relay runners of all time and helped the British team win Gold at Hitler’s Olympics in 1936.
He is also remembered as the father of Charlotte Rampling, the actress. She was one of the few famous people born in Haverhill in Suffolk.
Advantage Murray?
Andy Murray didn’t seem too pleased about being made to play under the roof and lights at Wimbledon last night. After all it could be argued that he hadn’t had enough time to prepare and that things like his rackets were all strung to the wrong tension.
Perhaps!
But now he is the only person, who’s won a full five set match under the roof and lights. So perhaps he knows more about it than anyone else?
In that case he has an advantage!
Phew! Murray just gets through!
It was tight last night and Andy Murray just made it in five sets. But it was very much a spectacle under the new roof at Wimbledon. It would appear that the concept works. It would have been rather poor if it hadn’t!
But the same can’t be said for the under-21 footballers. They managed to lose four-nil to the Germans. Surprising, considering that the second team drew 1-1 a week ago.
Newmarket Nights
We had a great time at Newmarket Races on Friday night. Racing with drinks and a salad followed by music, from Lemar, Estelle and Alisha Dixon. There was something for everyone, even if the horse we supported didn’t run as well as expected.
Go! You might enjoy it.
Remember though, that many race meetings allow kids under 16 in free. Not Newmarket Nights though! So over the summer, when you’re at a loss about what to do, give it a go.
The Anonymous Widower 