Spectator Life

I am slightly surprised at the way that bookmakers have priced up Monday’s Paddy Power New Year's Day Handicap Chase (Cheltenham 2.05 p.m.). Stage Star is a lovely young horse who has, with the exception of a flop at Aintree in April at the end of a long season, improved with every race over the past year. As a result, he is rightly vying for favouritism with Allaho for the Grade 1 Ryanair Chase at the Cheltenham Festival in March. However, the New Year’s Day contest is a handicap and he must give the best part of two stones to most of his rivals, some of them pretty decent in their own right. I can see why he might be edging favouritism in three days’ time but odds of evens or, in some cases, odds on seem far too short.

Elizabeth David was a cookery writer who led the British palate away from the grim days of stodgy, post-war rationing towards the adoption of a fresher, more Mediterranean diet. But she saved the most resonant advice of her six decade writing career for an observation on how to survive a typical British Christmas. Describing the festive period here as The Great Too Much that has also become The Great Too Long, David wrote: A ten-day shut-down, no less, is now normal at Christmas. On at least one day during The Great Too Long stretch, I stay in bed, making myself lunch on a tray. Smoked salmon, home-made bread, butter, lovely cold white Alsace Wine. A glorious way to celebrate Christmas.

Christmas, we are often told, is rich in traditions invented by the Victorians (or even later), and it was a rather austere affair before Charles Dickens. But while it is true that the Victorians gave us many of our Christmas traditions in their current form, English Christmas traditions before the Victorian era were simply different, not non-existent – and they were every bit as exuberant as what came after, if not more so. One of those long-lost pre-Victorian traditions of Christmas is mumming; something which was as synonymous with Christmas 200 years ago as a fat man in a red suit with a proclivity for housebreaking is today.

I’ve never been keen on pagans. They strike me as attention seekers with no actual merits to boast of except saying that they don’t believe in organised religion – something most of us got over at 15. Claiming to be a pagan is also a way of hinting that you’re having better sex than everybody else, whereas the reality is rather like that of those alleged ‘witches’ who oft appeared in the News of the World when I was a child. Middle-aged suburban swingers sporting pendulous breasts and maternal thighs, posing coyly inside a pentagram – and the women were just as bad.

There are only some seven weeks left for connections to get their horses qualified for the 2024 Randox Grand National. This year it will be harder than ever to get a run in the Aintree marathon, with just 34 runners, instead of the usual 40, for safety reasons. That means a horse will need an official rating of around 147 to be almost certain of getting into the race when the weights are announced in mid-February. Tomorrow there are at least two horses who will be looking to win the Betfred Tommy Whittle Handicap Chase (Haydock 1.30 p.m.) and not just for the £26,000 first prize. Borders trainer and jockey team Stuart Coltherd and his son, Sam, are keen to run their eight-year-old gelding COOPER’S CROSS in the Grand National on 13 April.

Half of Britain is said to have watched The Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show in 1977. Spain’s Christmas lottery, broadcast live to the nation each year on the morning of 22 December and marking for many the start of the holidays, is a similar moment of national unity. Spaniards everywhere down tools, watching with bated breath as lives throughout the country are transformed. Lottery tickets are untraceable so previous years have seen furtive-looking men carrying suitcases full of banknotes descend on bars, lottery outlets and banks This year the television cameras and the giant spherical cage containing thousands of numbered wooden balls will be in place as usual.

Shane MacGowan spent much of his life in pubs, working in them, drinking in them, performing in them – even living in a couple. He would have turned 66 on Christmas Day, state retirement age, so he was only three and a half weeks short of reaching a finishing line of sorts when he died at the end of November.  Perhaps if he’d just stuck to pints, he might have made it. Guinness is, after all, good for you. But there were also spirits. I can’t imagine quite how many shots he drank over seven decades. And it was seven: MacGowan claimed to have had his first Guinness aged four, his first whisky at eight. Drugs soon followed. And then, later, everyone wanted to buy him a drink.

As a travel writer, you soon learn that there are countries which, when you mention them, elicit a polite smile of incomprehension, which says: er, where’s that then? Laos is a classic example. Also Kyrgyzstan. And maybe Eswatini. But can it be true that there are chunks, regions, entire departments of France that conjure the same puzzled stare? Oui, my Spectator reading friends, c’est vrai: and that place is Lozere. France may be the single most touristed country on earth, the one country the whole world knows, yet for the last few weeks, when I’ve told people I’m off to do a French travel piece in the department of Lozere I’ve been confronted with flat incomprehension, then embarrassingly incorrect guesses: is it in Brittany? Is it an overseas island?

It’s that time of year. The sound of a Silesian Bratwurst connecting with cold lips. A security guard getting aggy with the actor playing ‘the elf’. Ketchup spraying into the air like celebratory champagne. Spilled mulled wine inebriating the local rat population. Overpriced tat sold in gift box form to drooling tourists.  It’s Christmas market season. A confusing month of crowded streets and impulsive shoppers. But Christmas markets have nothing to do with Christmas. They did once. They do in Germany. But these markets, the central city cesspits, are nothing more than shoddy farmers’ markets in tinsel.  ‘No, thank you. Merry Christmas.’ We walked away.  There is an idea of a Christmas market – something that is almost holy.

I have followed the fortunes of GIN COCO closely for the past two seasons and, even though the gelding will turn eight on New Year’s Day, I am convinced his best days still lie ahead of him. He has been lightly raced during his career with three wins from just nine runs and he could yet go novice chasing next year. Gin Coco is clearly a much better horse on good rather than soft ground. The official going of ‘soft’ was initially thought to have been the reason for poor run in the County Hurdle at this year’s Cheltenham Festival. It later transpired, however, that he had fractured his pelvis during the race and so he did well to win his second race back from a break at Ascot last month.

The housing market indices have stabilised, started rising even. So is that it? Is the great housing market crash over, before it had had a chance even to begin? Not according to the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). Buried in its latest Economic and Fiscal Outlook report is a prediction that the slump is far from over. Average prices, it forecasts, will fall by 4.7 per cent in 2024 and will not return to their 2022 levels until 2027. Transactions, the OBR believes, will also plummet by a further 6.9 per cent next year. While that might not bother homeowners so much it certainly will affect estate agents, who live or die on volumes of transactions rather than on prices. There is another thing about the housing market.

On a snowy night in Nuremberg, a city that encapsulates the best and worst of Germany, a huge crowd has gathered in the ancient Marktplatz for the opening of the Christkindlesmarkt, Bavaria’s biggest Christmas market. Cradling mugs of steaming Glühwein, stamping our feet to keep out the cold, we’re all waiting for the Christkind (Christ Child) to appear on the balcony of the Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady), an event that marks the start of Nuremberg’s Advent season. Five hundred years ago, Nuremberg was one of the biggest cities in Central Europe Turns out we have Martin Luther to thank for this quaint Teutonic custom.