RACE WEEK: The triple-distilled spirit of Ireland!

Winner more than alright by Allan Cavanagh of caricatures-ireland.com/blog/

The horse’s name was Minesadouble. I mean, come on. I had to, right? I’m a whiskey drinker.

Back when I lived in 80’s London, I was a whisky drinker, without the ‘e.’ Before your triple-distilled Jameson became my liquid home, Scotch whisky was my tipple.

That old English 6th of a gill measure barely dampened the glass, so I always ordered a double. Famous Grouse, because it was my Dad’s choice too.

In those pre-digital days of stark reality, placing a bet involved going to the bookies. On the morning of this bet, I was strolling down Portobello Road.

Now those street cobbles are polished, the area gentrified and sterilised, but in those days there were two distinct parts of that 'manor.'

Notting Hill Gate was yuppie frappaccino wine bar bliss, an ideal location for Julia Roberts to meet Hugh Grant in the movie.

Around the corner, the streets of Westbourne Park and Portobello were poor and dilapidated. All Saints Road served as West London’s Front Line for street drug deals.

I was hopelessly in love, wandering the legendary market, looking for something that might put a smile on the face of the lucky winner of my obsessive attention.

Taking a breather from the packed streets, I turned up a side road, and spotted Ladbroke’s familiar Golden Circle.

Ah go on. Why not? It’s Saturday. All bets are off, so put one on.

You just can’t argue with that kind of logic.

That bookies was absolutely tiny, crammed with punters, mostly Rastafarians. There was a symphonic buzz of secretive whispers, angry shouts and joyous laughs, the air pungent with hash and grass.

Taking deep breaths for a free secondary high, I eased my way to the wall, where I stared at the Sporting Life's tipsters grid.

For my ‘shot to nothing’ bet I look for a race where all the tipsters have chosen the same horse, except for one.

Then I’ll check to see if it’s run the distance and deeply technical stuff, like does it have a leg at each corner?

That’ll do for me.

There it was: Minesadouble, picked by one expert, who had also napped it, which implied he knew something the others didn't.

Minesadouble? Named for me, and 20/1? Luvvly bloomin' jubbly! I’ll 'ave summathat.

A fiver on the nose, which then felt like betting €50 to win today. A decidedly decent bet, which looked even prettier when the nap proved the tipster’s inside knowledge.

As Minesadouble came on in the final furlong, I started pumping the air with my fist.

Repeatedly grunting inaudible words, as men do while their horse is passing all the others, I was unaware of the attention I was receiving from everyone in the minuscule space.

They’d all turned to watch me, 30 or 40 pairs of eyes focused on me, willing my horse to win, and when Minesadouble flew past the post, the place erupted in shouts and yells and general testicular jubilation.

Instantly I became the centre of attention.

“Wha’ odds ye ‘ave, man?”

“Twenty to one!”

“Ya say wah? Bloodclaat! Ye ‘ave wha? ‘Ear that? ‘Ear that! Man here ‘ave ‘is ‘orse at twenty to one! Bloodclaat! Whass in da next race? Go on! Whass ya nex’ ‘orse?”

“ ’Ow you know? ’Ow you know? You give me a tip, yeh? C’mon, give me a tip and I give you some of me personal!”

After much handshaking, shrugging and smiling, the others realised I was just a lucky mug punter, who'd liked the name of a horse.

Pocketing my hundred, I invested my stake of five quid on a little local green, and arrived home to my beloved, laden with strawberries, cream and a bottle of champagne, which we consumed, drenched in sunshine, lying on the grass in Golders Hill Park.

If Galway is pure Ireland, and Race Week is the triple-distilled spirit of Galway, then Ireland is essentially Race Week.

Every year, immediately after hosting the nation’s biggest arts festival, Galway slips into the largest social and sporting week in the country’s calendar.

Race Week is mad, bad and wonderful. Whoever you are, whatever you’re doing, if you’re around Galway, as sure as gee-gees love carrots, Race Week will infect you, working its way into your mind and body like a metaphysical tapeworm.

This week should come with a health warning: “The Galway Races may empty your wallet, destroy your liver and send you stark staring cuckoo.”

Be kind to your bar-people, servers and cooks. They’re working their backsides off for you. Tip them well.

Last year I was in a Salthill bookies, jostling for space by the newspapers on the wall.

A well-dressed elegant woman in her 60s tapped me on the shoulder.

 “Sorry, now, excuse me, but do you know, how do ye spell that horse’s name? Jesus Mary Mother of feckin’ God, can you bleedin’ believe my eyesight? Is that an ‘R’ or a feckin’ ‘A’? Good God almighty, sweet Jesus, it’s fucking unbelievable, isn’t it?”

The slang of my adopted home might be slightly different to that of the Rastas in my native London, but as Del Boy would say:

 “Plat du jour, my son, plat du jour!”


©Charlie Adley
31.07.2024

The Galway Races: immoral and magnificent!

What’s a fella to do, as the song says. The thunder clouds roll in and it’s sweaty and the flies are out and it’s been another Race Week. To be honest, I’ve no idea what the weather’s like as you read. I just took a punt. A gamble. Sunshine, showers, humid and bit on the shtinky side, d’y’know. Race Week weather.

Siobhan in Claregalway spent hours in front of her long cupboard mirror on Thursday morning, checking her accessories. Tommy from Salthill, well, nobody’s seen hide nor hair of him for days, but that’s the way it is in Race Week. He’ll get himself into a card game and you won’t see him ‘til he’s done. Used to be a problem back in the day when the kids were young, but now, well, to be honest, it frees up his long-suffering missis for a few days. So everyone’s happy.

Everyone's happy because it’s Race Week. Himself from Ballybrit is happy because he gets a bit of work at the Owners and Trainers Bar. He’s on the door, watching the good money coming in and the bad money going out. He’s grinning to himself at the pittance he’s being paid compared to these Fianna Fail gombeens. He’s watching it all and lapping up the scenery. It’s like a human Noah’s Ark so it is, coming and going. 

There’s the ones who should be coming and going, and they’d tend to be yer trainers and owners, and then there’s all these other yokes who are looking for nothing but a little bit of information, d’y’see? Just a nod or a wink from the bloke who owns a fetlock and Colm from Roscommon is on to his phone to do the betting on t’internet faster than the Heineken floods cold nectar into his glass from the tap in front of him.

Then there’s the players. He sees them, because he knows how people can hide in plain sight. The really good ones are the ones that most people miss, but he sees them, what with his training and all that. Hiding in plain sight, relaxed, happy, calm, but sucking up the hottest angles, placing the biggest bundles on the nose.

They’re not yer each way betters. He smiles as he thinks of it. No, these aren’t yer each wayers. These are the players.

The work is good, he’s happy for it, but the watching, listening and learning, that’s better than a banker’s bonus. Well, no, not better than a banker’s bonus, but great craic. Rather be doing it than not, safe to say.

Siobhan’s met up with her friends in Eyre Square, and heading up to the course on the bus. They were going to get a taxi, do it Full-On Girl Style, but there was a bus right there, so wha’the.

Her mates all look great and it’s just a kickin’ day out. She’ll get the first round in. That’s it, she’ll get the first bottle of bubbles for the girls, that way everybody’ll remember and nobody’ll notice that she doesn’t do much betting. The bus had been a Godsend. Thank you God, she says to herself as she listens to Anne-Marie’s story about Bulmers and an English lad called Brian.

She’d budgeted for her share of a taxi, but now, as long as the bubbles weren’t too crazy expensive, she might even have a bit left to bet with, too. Now that’d be a bit of a laugh alright. She’s working part-time in a supermarket and hitching to lectures at NUIG. Loans and rent and life’s not all fun, but you have to sometimes.

Sometimes you just have to, and it’s Ladies Day.

Then it’s Family Day, at the weekend, and another buzz, relaxed and bouncy castles and still the streets of the city are buzzing and fussing with eaters and drinkers, Gardai and men in gold and silver standing still on top of boxes.

After his stint working the bar door, Himself is back in town, sitting outside Coili’s, watching a fire juggler across the way.

Turning to the grey-haired boho next to him he says

“He’s alright, s’pose, but not good enough for Johnny Massacre Corner!”

The man replies,

“I am sorry. Vot? Who is John ze Masterpiece, pliz?”

Himself smiles, moves his head forwards and backwards like a wading bird and

“S’alright mate, no bother.”

What was he thinking? Like yeh, really, the guy’s gonna be a Galwegian, tonight, in Race Week!

Race Week, the concentrated essence of the city of Galway, attracting the rest of the country like no other single national Irish event. Cork’s got its jazz and Kilkenny makes comedy and well as hurlers. There’s the All Ireland Finals at Croker, but that’s a couple of hours sport with a day and night’s drinking. They come to Galway for a week, but it’s not the length of days. This is not merely some pathetic endurance test. Back when Wednesday was the big day, Plate Day, and the meeting ran only a few days, the Galway Races were no less significant; important; immoral; magnificent.

There’s a depravity, corruption and decadence to the affair that cannot be ignored, but putting aside the traffic and the pavement pizzas for a moment, the best part of Race Week is the spirit of the city. Galway soaks up the farmers, politicians, insurance brokers and hairdressers. They are all welcome to have their own parties, to gamble and screw each other, or gently sip tea and suck Galway oysters from the half shell.

Siobhan’s mascara is a disaster by the time she’s back on Quay Street. The cobbled streets are a total mare to her now, ouch, those bleedin’ heels, exhausted, too much to drink, but nobody noticed about the money. Now they want to go for a drink. She’s enough for one and the bus home.

“Coili’s for the music?” asks Roisin.

So they head up High Street, and in the distance, Himself spots Siobhan, and she kinda catches his eye.

What’s a fella to do?

When you’re five years old, a gentle canter feels like a mad stampede!

Race Week is around the corner, and our city’s raison d’être is about to kick in once more, in the shape of a few handsome thoroughbreds and 250,000 drunken punters.
I cannot admit to loving horses. Unlike those many who can think of nothing more wonderful than to own, ride and care for the beasts, they are to me gracious, alien, intriguing and occasionally just downright scary.
My first and definitely most influential encounter with a gee-gee was at the age of five, when for some completely misguided reason my parents thought I needed to learn how to ride.
Nurturing a dream of some kind of high-falluting romantic lifestyle for their youngest child, while drowning in bourgeois ambition, they probably thought I’d need a good steed in the stables of the mansion I would most certainly own when I became the Managing Director of the country’s foremost advertising agency.
How wrong they were. Mind you, these were the very same parents who insisted upon dressing me in a sailor’s outfit before taking me to the very suspect local photographer.
So off I went with my Mum to a riding school out in Berkshire, where I found myself trussed up aloft what felt like a massive and powerful wild animal over which I had no control whatsoever.
As an adult looking back, I can now see that I was well-equipped, and that my horse was being held on a tight line, or whatever you call it. We were standing motionless in a circle, nose to tail, with five other horses, bearing what I knew even at that tender age were insufferably precocious little brats with names like Tristan, Horatio, Christabelle and Alexandria.
Then I saw my Mum walk off. How could the woman who had slapped me (gently) on the back of my hand for standing too close to the kerb leave me here?
If it was dangerous to stand with your toes on the bloomin’ kerb, and very very bad to run into the road, how come it was alright to leave me alone, sitting high up on something that might run all the way to Africa?
Then I realised that my horse was the only one being held on a line. All these other posh kids seemed to know what they were doing, and pretty soon our tight motionless circle turned into a line, and we were walking out of the indoor ring, into a field.
The children on the other horses suddenly tucked their feet into the little metal rings, and were bouncing up and down like very silly-looking little people as their horses spread out.
My horse was evidently unused to being kept behind the group, and decided the time had come to join his mates. With one flick of his head he pulled the line from the stable lass holding him, and headed off at a gentle canter.
At least, from what I know now, I’d say it was a gentle canter. Several members of staff seemed suddenly agitated, running at speed towards me and my apparently insane animal.
As somebody whose entire experience of moving horses up to that point had been riding the wooden rocking horse in Lilly and Skinner’s shoe shop, this gentle canter appeared like a crazed and frantic stampede.
Pooping my poor little five year-old self from toe to tippy-tip-top, sure that my life was about to come to a brutal and tragically premature end, I did what any completely untrained and inexperienced person would do: aiming for the horse’s neck, I grabbed the reins and pulled like the crazy terrified little boy I was.
Now I know that horses don’t like that very much. He reared up and threw me backwards, and then I was on the ground with people crowding around me.
That was the first and last time I sat on a real horse.
Having got past the need to ride, my relationship with horses improved by leaps and bounds. As a teenager, I sat watching the racing on tele with my Dad, who impressed me no end by placing his bets on the phone, way back in the 1970’s.
Whilst in hospital after breaking my leg on a motorbike (the adolescent male version of its female horse equivalent), myself and the other biker casualties passed many afternoons with the ITV 7, a guaranteed plethora of racing, fluttering and much craic.
At 19 I worked in a big truck garage under the Kings Cross Arches, and became completely obsessed with the complex bets on offer at the local bookies. Each day, I spread my tiny stake into grids of combinations of nine races, thereby giving myself reason to spend all afternoon checking the results.
In the 80’s, my mate Chris and I went to meetings, armed with overflowing hip flasks and an absence of equine knowledge that might fill a black hole.
But the great thing about gambling is that you do win occasionally, as I did at Epsom, with Dr. Devious, in the Derby.
What a splendid memory that is! Standing under blue skies, on the inside rail just by the final furlong, cheering and roaring as the horses thundered past, shaking the ground beneath our feet.
My Mum told me long ago that the only dangerous thing about gambling is winning, and that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing,. She was right on both counts, so I’ve played it safe over the years, keeping my losses to such a vast proportion of my total betting that there has never been any danger of winning too much.
As far as a little knowledge goes, well, here’s my telepathetic and multi-sensory gambling method.
First, I stare at the little form numbers (they look like this: 13324-1) that precede the horse’s name in the newspaper listings.
Then I relax my eyesight; my mind glazes over, and I try to envision which runner’s list of numbers will soon end in a ‘1’. Like, if I can see that 13324-1 will become 13324-11, I’ll put my money on it.
But beware! If there are letters in there with the numbers, ignore the horse. If it looks like this: 231-FU2P, give it a miss!
My tip for Race Week? Take to Ballybrit only what you can afford to lose. Gambling is much more fun when you realise you pay to play.