The journey home was a dilemma. For 20 minutes I could only come up with "Coward of the County" as the name for today's blog. And the only Western I do tends to involve Clint Eastwood, Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone and most definitely not paired with "Country". Fortunately I remembered Doves before Evesham and the rest of the trip was stress free.
Well, I say "stress free" but Kevin was on the fish and chips order. We feared he'd channel the bloke from Fast Show and he'd be coming out saying "No, I didn't get fish and chips, I got something better". My worry only intensified when we stopped off to pick up the right beer and needed a few more sausages for brekkie. I went in this time- you know, you need a job doing and all that, but I thought I'd be safe enough leaving Kevin on the sausage purchase. He had a packet of Richmond in hand when we hit the till and I felt we probably deserved an upgrade on cardboard bangers. Kevin swore blind there was no other pork sausages. There were of course. Trays and trays of them. I'm not sure how the lad gets up in the morning.
Anyway, why the title? Because a delightfully frustrated chap went up and down the line telling every book that they were, and I quote, "f****** cowardly b*******" because we were generally about 11/8 on Teahupoo. Yes it did go off 5/4 and won pretty comfortably despite doing virtually everything wrong. I digress.
Anyone who has read my stuff before will know I'm not partial to this sort of behaviour from a punter just because he's having a bad day. So I politely offered him the Gambling Commission's address so he can apply for his licence and go 2/1 like he wanted, so presumably thought it was a fair price, whilst idly wondering whether he popped into Tesco with the same complaint about a tin of beans he'd just compared with the price at Sainsburys. Sadly he was out of earshot before I could offer to back it with him at 7/4 if he thought 2s was right. Bargain. His parting shot (to nobody in particular) was "I WANT 2s". I told him when I was 18 I wanted to go out with Elisabeth Shue but I was destined to be similarly disappointed.
1) Got stuck into Facile Vega which we stood for the max but, unfortunately, couldn't avoid laying Grey Dawning as well though and had it for about 3/4. Non handicaps continued to be next to impossible to get results in, but a virtually skinner in the places knocked off a chunk of pain. Still a loss, though more a scrape than a gaping wound.
2) The blessed relief of a big field handicap next up and we had maxes at the top of the market with Icare Allen and Gaoth Chuil plus Prairie Dancer at the bottom. Cleatus Poolaw rounded out the liabilities though slightly more modest. A skinner and a virtual skinner battled it out in that rarely played bookmaker game "Choose your winner". We chose the worst one but that was relative and we had the 2nd best result of the week. Though that's also relative after Tuesday's carnage.
3) Absolute max on Envoi Allen and a tiddler on Banbridge, though we felt we didn't get full reward when a late fairly chunky bet on Protektorat gave us an unspectacular win rather than the jackpot, but 2 winning races on the run was virtually uncharted territory and a poor jump from the jolly at the last saved us from further pain.
4) "I WANT 2s". Honestly, when my daughter was 3 and wanted a choccy biccy and a double header of In The Night Garden at bedtime she managed to ask with a bit more decorum. He wouldn't have got his 2s but we did get plenty of 11/8s and Teahupoo was a max. The places got us a little bit back but we just couldn't get on a proper roll.
5) Bingo Book with 5 bogeys lurking in various crevices in the book but Shakem Upharry wasn't one of them and we picked up a nice enough win on the 4th fav of 21. Places continued to favour us as we'd repaired the damage of the 4th.
6) Rancid place book of the week (and there's been a few other contenders) but we'd taken plenty on the win side for the top two to give us proper chances further down. And we hit the jackpot for the 2nd time today and, for the first time in 3 days, we were blinking in the sun.
7) And our luck held in the last when we largely steered the rather inconceivably priced 13/8 (from 9/4 ish) favourite in a 400 runner handicap. A small win was almost as inconceivable as the SP.
So it's all gone rather well since 4:45 yesterday, but, ultimately, all we've really accomplished is to get out of the hole and towelled off. We have the week's expenses covered but we now have a view of the field of potential profit rather than the abyss of certain loss. Our week, overall, stands and falls on tomorrow. Though even that that didn't look possible a little over a day ago. The chips did taste better than they did on Tuesday and Kevin even got the order right so nothing seems totally impossible. Though finding pork sausages in the trays and trays of pork sausages still seems a bridge too far.
Final day tomorrow. Until then...