Over to Alastair...

‘There is something wonderfully overblown and sparklingly vulgar about the Grand National. It is bonkers but beautiful’.

Alastair Down in 2008.

‘80% of the owners, trainers, jockeys and lads know that their horse hasn’t got an earthly, but on National day even the most grizzled realist allows himself to dream that accident, rank bad luck, freakish good fortune or the random hand of fate will strike down the heathens and let his horse be the one who schlepps up that insanely long run in to secure a place among the special’.

There is now no need for anyone else to try to explain the excitement, since Shakespeare and Satre combined would say it worse. Alastair, Imagining the winner’s enclosure, whoever it might eventually contain, went on …

‘We will never know what the pain was like, how he found the resource to answer the desperate demands from on top, or where the extra leg appeared from at the critical moment when everything hung in the balance. If there is ever a time to stand back and let the love flow, it is in those steaming moments after the line has been passed and the history-chisellers are getting to work’.

The words are discriminating and passionate, but then comes the clunking brevity, homage offered to the common sense of the common man and woman.

For example, in praising Sea The Stars after his Arc victory Down wrote of ‘superiority, not just over those opposing him at Longchamp but of virtually every other thoroughbred in the 300 years that the species has trod the earth’.

When Lester renewed his licence at the age of 55, he contributed ... ‘It was a sporting return from the dead that would have made the Sphinx blink, and all resurrections must involve a miracle’.

In the piece of 14 years ago Down was keen to describe the host city. Like a poet, he is anxious for it to be his words that fork the lightning …

‘Much seems to have been made of Liverpool being honoured as the European City of Culture, but only by dimwits who think culture is all about inaccessible high art along the dread, monied lines of opera and ballet. It is also about wit, street wisdom, tradition, music, architecture, love of the spoken word and the survival of dark times. It is a place of slavery, a port city of travel out across the world and host to a vast influx of every immigrant wave that ever broke on these shores …’

Then, recovering from reverie, it’s to business …

‘And somewhere into this impossibly rich mix fits that great old slapper of a race, the National … The greybeards will tell you that it casts a pale shadow of its former terrors. If by that they mean that the fences are fairer, the drops less freakish, and that it is now a set of obstacles rather than a series of barely foreseeable traps, then they are right - and thank God for it’.

A writer with something to say.

The Grand National is on Saturday week.