Racing Snake Sept 09
Folkestone revisited...
I've always regarded the hunter chase night at Folkestone as rather special, as do many other point-to-point fans, but it seems not everyone shares this enthusiasm. This from "My Week" in the Racing post by Walter Buick, father of up-and-coming Flat jockey William, and race reader for the Press Association:
"A terrible day ahead at Folkestone. It's a 300-mile round-trip and it's a hunter chase card. I really struggle with this meeting as I don't recognise the riders , their silks or the horses. Some of the riders are two fences behind and should pull up but don't. It's a race-reader's nightmare. I have to park almost in Dover to make a fast getaway and to top it all it's pouring."
Grumpy old bugger! It wasn't pouring: it was drizzling, which is a huge improvement on Folkestone's normal May weather of minus 20 degrees plus wind chill. I also thought the bit about not recognising anybody was a bit rich coming from a man whose principal claim to fame is to have been 8 times champion jockey in Norway!
To be fair it was otherwise a very good article, with Buick's intense pride in his son's blossoming career clearly shining through his prose. But he does need re-educating about our hunter chase night.
(Note to Channel 4 Racing presenters: "Up-and-coming" means enterprising, promising and gaining in importance. It does NOT mean imminent or after the stairlift ads, that is "Coming up".)
Personally I had a cracking night, seeing familiar faces - human and equine - backing a shedload of winners, including a tasty outsider at Ludlow, and then hitting the pub.
The pub in question being p-t-p commentator David Rhys-Jones' Royal Oak, which is only about 15 or 20 minutes from the course, unless you have me navigating.
I managed to get us lost in the mists of Romney Marsh, doing a complete circle via two American Werewolves and a Wicker Man before arriving back at the racecourse. We then abandoned Google's ambiguous directions and reverted to the main roads which pass within 100 yards of the pub. That's also as close as civilization is ever likely to get to Deliverance-in-the-Marsh, or whatever they call the one-horse gene pool where Rhysie chooses to live.
It's a great pub, but looks the sort of village where locals greet each other by slapping palms together and saying "Yo! Gimme six!"
Rhysie and Zara did a cracking job as hosts with a tasty lasagne and good beer as a perfect antidote to Folkestone's miserable weather. The true definition of gluttony is an amateur jockey who knows he isn't going to see a clerk of the scales again for another 5 months.
Walter Buick does have a point about the traffic. We got lucky with a cheeky run on the rails, but it could have taken an age. All racecourse managers need to visit Badminton horse trials, where I went for the first time this year. A crowd of 100,000 plus and I still got out with less fuss than I would at Penshurst.
I gather there are plans to rebuild half of Folkestone as a housing estate; sounds like a good opportunity to sort out the access. I wonder if the new residents will have to wait an hour to get out of their drives in the morning. I wonder if anyone will tell them they are buying a house in a place that is slightly colder than Finland.
According to my diary, normal life resumes again on October 16th, when Edward Gillespie once again opens Cheltenham's gates to the faithful. Until then the summer drags on with Nottingham, Pontefract and others. Whoop-bloody-ee.
