The Shadow

TRY ON THIS HALO

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30 January 2009

A LITTLE while ago I got a terrible telling off from my daughter Tracey for not being serious enough about the difficult times we are facing.  

I was not making light of them, I was simply trying to put them in perspective. Everybody else is having their four pennyworth about the Credit Crunch so I might as well have mine.

I am not dissing the very serious problems facing a lot of people at the moment. The message I would like to get out to people is that these financial upheavals come and go all the time. When times are good you have to enjoy them and remember that there will be harder times around the corner and that when times are hard, like they are now, that it will not last for ever and that better times are on their way.

When I was a little boy during the last war there were merchant seamen sailing out of Surrey Docks knowing that there were packs of German U Boats waiting out there for them. Every morning when you came out of the shelters or up from the Underground the first thing you did was go to your house to see if it was still standing.

One of my earliest memories was looking up at the sky over Wapping and everything above my head was the colour of blood. The East End was ablaze. My next memory is of looking down at my feet and the streets were carpeted with broken glass.

My only other recollection of that night was one of our neighbours searching in the glass at his feet. He had been carrying his precious willow pattern china chamber pot down the shelter and had dropped it and smashed it. The air raid sirens were wailing and the sound of the Dornier bombers filled the air and all our neighbour wanted to do was collect the pieces of his piss-pot to glue them back together.

As a nation we overcame those horrendous times and we shall do so again. We have to allow that wartime never-say-die spirit of good neighbourliness and sharing to come to the surface again. Let's try to think about people worse off than ourselves then our own problems will seem so much more bearable.

One thing I would like to see happen to help people cheer up is for a new racing super-hero to emerge. We have all seen the movie about Seabiscuit and Phar-lap who caught the imagination of the masses in the USA and in Australia, raising morale with their heroic exploits.

My old Dad used to tell me about a hoss called The Tetrarch which the public piled into every time it ran. My Dad said he saw him run and related how he was called The Rocking Horse because he was a very striking dapple grey, they way old Victorian rocking horses used to be painted.

Another hoss my Dad talked about was Golden Miller. It is quite probable that he did have super hero status with the public, but he was owned by Dorothy Paget, a woman my father could not stomach, so I heard no stories of his exploits from my father. In more recent times we have had Arkle and Persian Punch and the great mare Dawn Run but the two who stand out as the all time people's heroes are Desert Orchid and the immortal Red Rum.

I am proud to say I saw both of them race in the flesh and both deserved their heroic status and, I might add, both knew just how famous they were.

There is an old saying Cometh The Hour Cometh The Man. I am going to change that to Cometh The Hour Cometh The Hoss. Step forward the super hero for the Credit Crunch Age, your public awaits you.

I have got a couple of bets for you at the weekend and they are both at Sandown. I am going for Celestial Halo in the 14.05 and Araldur in the 14.35. My hoss Lawyer To World remains on course to be a nice each way earner in the charity meeting at Fakenham in a couple of weeks' time.

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