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Last weekend it was better than ever. We went over 50,000 of us altogether to the opening of the new track, a broad band of green velvet cambering over what had once been the Football Club. It was a perfect evening, the end of a flawless autumn afternoon blue skies and scudding white clouds. Stepping on to the track from the new marble halls where the ancient and powerful club administers its affairs, you could see the race track sweeping down from its highest point to the grandstands rising like cliff-faces to the right. If the horses ran backwards, that I suppose would be their Tattenham Corner view.
I said it was a perfect evening. Not quite. I tried a new system of betting. It works even less well than its predecessors. Let me tell you about it so that you can avoid doing anything half so stupid yourselves.
You turn to the chart in your favourite newspaper which summarises the predictions of all the professional tipsters from Captain Courageous to Madame Voodoo. Then you take a pencil and draw a line diagonally across the paper from the top left hand corner of the chart to the bottom right hand. Following this, you proceed to bet on each of the predictions touched by the line, so for example in the first race you bet on the horses at the top of the left hand column; in the second, you bet on the horses two down in the column second from the left. And so on triumphantly down the page. A multiple tierce on each one will help to maximise your chances of losing steadily all evening.
I can now confirm that this is not a system that will make your fortune; it is not even a system that will enable you to pay for a taxi home, should that be required. You would think twice about recommending it to the person you liked least in the world, and you might not even offer it to a friend.
So next time, I'm going back to the drawing board, and combining the clairvoyance of a friend's amah, names that my wife likes, numbers that are divisible by three, and grey horses. However, if any of these animals walks side-ways when it gets out on the track my most distinguished adviser tells me to drop it like a hot cake straightaway. He may be right or he may just have an aversion to hairy crabs.
Win or lose, it was a happy evening.