Horses for Courses

It’s five thirty in the morning and I’m sat in my room, fully awake.

(Half an hour of sleep later)

Ok, obviously not. In the days since my last blog a number of good and bad things have happened.

The Good:

My friends and I went to Wiltshire and stayed in Gandhi’s cottage, I got drunk in a car and urinated in a field, we ate a BBQ, hid under a bed, wrestled till blood was drawn, dressed up in 1930’s attire and had a murder mystery party.

The Bad:

Unfortunately while we were fooling around in the cottage my sporting dreams came crashing down around me. The first nightmare occurred on Saturday at 16:15 in Aintree. The Grand National is the only event I will ever gamble on and is also the only horse race I have ever watched. I invariably spend the Friday before studying newspaper articles and websites to get the low down on the best horses. After hours of research I eventually pick the horses with the best name or the best colour scheme. This year I went with Black Apalache, Flintoff and one other, a french horse with a really stupid name.

I eagerly paced down to Ladbrooks and put three pounds on each of them to win outright. That’s right, to win, none of this each way bollocks. As far as I’m concerned betting each way is for the elderly and people with vaginas. If you bet something is going to happen, actually bet that it’s going to happen. Don’t bet that your horse might win, but also that it might come second, third or fourth. It’s cheating.

Anyway my good friends Rock, Rebel and I listened to the race on the radio because our cottage didn’t have a telly. The radio makes everything twice, if not three times as exciting because you can’t see what's going on at all. Instead, you can imagine whatever you like is happening. In my head every horse is on fire, (Physically in flames) going at one hundred miles an hour, has wheels instead of legs and is painted bright blue.

As you can imagine, when Black Apalache wheel spinned into the lead my head nearly exploded. He had been lingering in second for some time, which my friend Rock and I had decided was excellent horse tactics, and then pranced over a fence into a commanding lead. I was sure this was my year. I’d never won before, so surly this was my turn, my destiny.

Black Apalache pranced on and on with a trail of thick black smoke bellowing out of his exhaust. He jumped fence after fence with ease, cruising clear of the trailing pack and for one glorious moment victory looked certain but then something terrible happened. After the very last fence, on the final straight, Black Apalache faded. I found out later that fading is quite a common equestrian problem. It happens when a horse uses up all its energy and slows down towards the end of the race but at the time, I was livid. How could this animal I had offered so much encouragement, “COME ON HORSE,” “JUMP YOU BASTARD,” etcetera, betray me? It’s not like he had fallen over after bravely galloping over a fence, it just looked as though he decided he didn’t want to win anymore.

That final straight will live long in my memory. The images are scorched into my brain. Black Apalache is going like the clappers and then all of a sudden, begins to disappear. His wheels turn into legs, his fire fizzles out and he is transformed into a naked middle aged man, worse still, there is a superfast T- rex chasing behind him and worst of all Rebel has an each way bet riding on the T-rex. The next few seconds last an eternity as Rebel’s T Rex catches up with the naked, middle aged Black Apalachi and gobbles him up like a porn star giving a blowie.

The T-rex won, and so did Rebel, and so did each way.

The dream was over for another year.

The second defeat was equally difficult to accept as my beloved Tottenham Hotspur were, unceremoniously dumped out of the FA Cup by the ugliest girl in the class, Portsmouth. I find that being a Tottenham fan is a lot like trying to woo ladies in sixth form. You keep asking out the hottest girls in the school but each time you do, you get beaten back down to reality and have to settle for the plain Jane’s like Burnley. Having only just been dumped by the ugly and fat Portsmouth, tonight Tottenham are going to try and get with the prettiest girl in the League. The girl they have always fancied is coming over and Tottenham are going to make a move. Now there is no reason why Tottenham shouldn’t beat Arsenal. The Gunners have put on a bit of weight lately; they have self esteem issues and only recently got dumped by the hottest guy in the world, Barcalona. On the other hand, Spurs have been getting a lot of action lately. Their looking trim, they started growing a beard and arn’t as spotty as they used to be. It’s the perfect opportunity for Spurs to fill the role of rebound guy. Will they take it?

No. Having gathered vast experience of both Tottenham and Sixth Form I have realized the result of asking out a hot girl and playing Arsenal are almost exactly the same. You lose/get rejected, get drunk, stagger home, tug yourself dry in the shower, then go to bed and cry yourself to sleep. Alternatively you could sit and cry in the shower, go to bed, and then tug yourself to sleep, it’s up to you.

If only Tottenham had the confidence to beat Arsenal. After all their in the same league, Arsenal are just people, they have faults, they’re not untouchable but Tottenham don’t believe that they can get with them and that’s the problem. I mean Liverpool may be sluts but we managed to screw them, and it might have only been a one night stand but we fucked Chelsea a year or two ago. Each time we come up against Arsenal we’re too nice to them. We show them too much respect. Arsenal have been put on a pedestal and as long as their sat up there Tottenham are always going to settle for being ‘just friends.’

But maybe, just maybe, tonight’s the night that we finally get what we always wanted. Perhaps we can get Arsenal drunk or pray on their insecurities, or both. If we can do that then there is the slightest chance that they may be seduced by our new charm.



It will probably be a draw, but I don’t have a metaphor for that.