Racing Imagined

Apart from the buzz of this ersatz, gambling, there was the poetry of racing as I imagined it, particularly on the flat, I´d never visited a racecourse, we didn't have telly then and the few big races i´d seen on the news at the cinema were in black-and-white, So my fancy was free. I always saw, even on overcast days, the glamorous meetings - Ascot, Epsom, Goodwood (golden names) - as pulsatingly taking place, at those tracks which for me had no actual location but floated in some vague and wonderful beyond, somewhere Out There, I saw them as taking place in a great solid slab of sunlight, on turf of gilded green that set off the jockeys' silks even more richly than the lamplit baize did the balls on the Prince Albert snooker table. As for those silks, their verbal contraction in the racecards - Crmsn and gold qtrs, crmsn cap; pk with mvw arm hps, mve cap seemed correspondingly to concentrate their colours, to set them glowing even more intensely against their imagined background of emerald-gold.

But, in the same way that a simple black-and-white airline schedule may stimulate a traveller'simagination as powerfully as some full-colour holiday brochure, so just as magical to me as my multichrome reveries were the (pre-selection) colourless racecards in the paper. How, standingby their own in simple black, unembellished with any conjured up silks, the horses names entrancedme, Not just the splendid names, like PURPLE EMPEROR, or the evocative, like DESERT ISLAND, buteven the mundane, like WAIT A WHILE, or the incomprehensible, like DEFERRED ANNUITY For thethrill those names gave me derived not at all from their meaning or from imagining in physical formthe runners that bore them but entirely from the printed names themselves, the unique collection of letters that composed each (their bold sanserif made the serif cards of other papers seem so prosaic that I could scarcely believe the runners were the same) and that summoned up not an actual horse, not a compact chestnut, say, or a strapping grey, but, in a demonstration of the imagination's unremitting striving towards the ideal.