Spectator Life

It began after pint of beer on a Friday evening and a grudging realisation that, well, getting a little bit more active would be no bad thing. Before I knew it, I’d talked myself into doing a 60-mile cycle through the Essex countryside the following Sunday morning – part of an organised cycle race, charmingly called the Tour de Tendring. Setting off from Harwich in a borrowed Lycra two-piece cycling outfit – looking like a human love handle mated with a mobility scooter – I set off at 8.30 a.m., pedalling into the unknown. What would give up first, my knees, the gears on my rusty old, steel-framed Dawes Galaxy or my spirits?

Horses drawn high had a considerable advantage in the big sprint races at Haydock a year ago and I suspect it will be same again tomorrow, even though the going is much softer than 12 months ago. There could be a particular advantage for front runners if they claim the near-side rail early on and don’t go too fast in order to keep that advantageous position. There are other complicating factors, however, for punters, notably the ground which, as of this morning was ‘soft, heavy in places’. That’s almost certain to mean there will be several non runners between now and tomorrow afternoon, with horses that prefer good ground kept for another day. In the Group 2 Betfred Temple Stakes (tomorrow 1.50 p.m.

My son and various well-meaning friends have been advising me to abandon writing history books and cash in on the trend for boarding school misery memoirs. On the face of it, as someone who was sent away aged seven and remained in these institutions until I was 18, I am well qualified to add my contribution to what has now become a recognised sub-genre of English literature. My problem, though, is that I quite enjoyed my time at boarding schools and I cannot claim – as so many do – that it adversely affected my life; rather the reverse. In his extended essay ‘Such, such were the joys’, George Orwell recorded his awful schooldays at St Cyprians, a snobbish boys preparatory school in Eastbourne.

Like many Brits, I never had perfect teeth. Even when I was young they weren’t gleaming white and the two front ones had a gap between them. I grew to quite like my gap – ‘diastema’ to give it the correct name – and found out all kinds of interesting facts about it. In The Canterbury Tales, the ‘gap-toothed Wife of Bath’ symbolised the supposedly lustful nature of diastemata types, who include Madonna and Brigitte Bardot. In some African countries, the condition is considered so attractive that there is a roaring trade in cosmetic dentistry to create it.

In Gerald Weiner’s book The Secrets of Consulting, there is a case study in which a bright MBA graduate tells a giant multinational burger chain to eliminate just three sesame seeds from each bun to save the company $126,000 a year, under the assumption that none of the customers will notice. This works, so the next year they remove five sesame seeds, and, each year or two, they remove some more, until the bun is barely recognisable. Suddenly, nobody buys their burgers anymore. I get the sense that nothing on the internet really works – or at least no longer works for us I would suggest that the same thing has happened to the internet.

Tyson Fury, the towering British behemoth with the quick wit and even quicker fists, is ready to fight Oleksandr Usyk. Unlike Usyk, however, Fury is not just a pugilist; he's a spectacle. He's one of boxing's greatest assets because he's not just in the business of winning fights. Fury's journey from rage to riches is as compelling as any Hollywood script, and he’s proven himself as much a showman as a slugger. His trash talk is legendary, a verbal ballet of insults that leaves opponents flustered and fans roaring. In this arena, he's often compared to another icon of the fight game: Conor McGregor. Both men share a knack for the theatrical, but while McGregor's star burned bright and fast, Fury's has evolved with time, growing more formidable with each bout.

The classiest race this weekend is the Group 1 Al Shaqab Lockinge Stakes at Newbury (tomorrow, 3.35 p.m.) in which the French-trained Big Rock and the Newmarket-trained Inspiral are understandably vying for favouritism. They are officially the two top rated horses in the race and they both finished last season on a high: Big Rock won the Group 1 Queen Elizabeth II Stakes at Ascot on Champions Day by a comfortable six lengths, while John and Thady Gosden’s Inspiral travelled to America and won the Grade 1 Maker's Mark Breeders' Cup Filly & Mare Turf by a neck under a strong Frankie Dettori ride.

To nearly any English tourist, the small southern Italian town I’m currently living in, half an hour from my daughter’s school, would seem idyllic. It has an old castle, a monastery and olive groves in all directions, but in Puglian guidebooks it barely rates a mention. It’s the scruffy, down-to-earth cousin of richer or bigger towns nearby, places like Monopoli or Bari, but has nearly everything I could want. There are arches and stone stairways, pot-plants everywhere (80 in my alleyway alone), and that delicious, ivory-coloured stone which paves the streets in Puglia and which long use has polished to a shine. At night the street-lanterns turn the white buildings orange, and the sky above is inky blue with stars.

If you have been to the cinema recently and arrived in time for the adverts, you may already know what I am talking about. Somewhere between promotions for mega-burgers in glorious technicolour and exotic holiday destinations, you are plunged into what seems an endless, but is actually only a two-minute, horror flick, entitled ‘Sicker than the patients’.  The fitness of at least half  the nursing and support staff I encountered left a lot to be desired It is two minutes of unrelieved gloom and despair, book-ended by a family rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’ around a sick patient (Daddy), who – lucky guy – appears to have a room to himself, not just a curtained bay where the sounds and smells penetrate from all around.