Ballymore Novices Hurdle (4000m): Just 10 go to post and only four are from the home side. That said, this isn’t the penalty kick for the Irish it might first appear. HERMES ALLEN won the Challow at Newbury, the credential middle distance novice hurdle at Christmas and is clear second favourite at 3s. Favourite is IMPAIRE ET PASSE, but he hasn’t been seen since winning the Moscow Flyer at Punchestown on heavy ground in mid-January. I wasn’t that taken with…
Weather & Going (according to MoonRabbit) the week will be wet and windy at times, if you are going your wind resistant waterproof is essential. Put some heatpads in pockets too. The course and famous hill are always a stamina test, wet tracks add jeopardy, but will rain actually make for much soft going – just not been business as usual under turf all winter after last summers heatwave, what falls just absorbs so quick. With thirsty water table despite…
It’s very rare indeed for any polling company to admit to making an error that has skewed a published poll. So rare indeed that we might speculate that whenever a polling company itself discovered an error in the past, the company concerned kept quiet and hoped that no-one else had noticed other than to assume that any unusually rogue result was down to sampling error or the like. Better to keep quiet than to suffer reputational damage by admitting an…
The Ukraine war is one year old. Here’s the scoreboard from a year of madness. The Human Cost : over a third of a million deaths, 200000+ Russian military, an estimated 100000 Ukrainian military and tens of thousands of civilians – many just executed. Given the uncertainties the figure quoted is on the conservative side. Over 5 million Ukrainian refugees living in host countries and a further 7 million are displaced in their own country. Nearly a million Russians –…
One of the constants in politics – more so from the Left – is how activists insist on telling voters that various events are “inevitable”. Somehow I’ve missed the inevitable triumph of communism. the inevitable collapse of capitalism and the inevitable collapse of civilisation due to warming/overpopulation/no oil ( take your pick ) . The break up the UK has also been declared “inevitable” a meme pushed by assorted nationalists and the usual suspects on the Left and yet the…
The 2021 census data reported that for the first time the catholic population was the largest religious group in Northern Ireland. Unsurprisingly Sinn Fein immediately began the push for a border poll. There was lots of noise and then towards the end of 2021 it all went quiet. Perhaps one of the reasons for the silence was a series of polls conducted by the Irish Times sampling views on the centenary of partition. The Irish Times polled voters both north…
Introduction The Intermarium is an area between the Baltic, Adriatic and Black Seas. It is not a country in the same way that Scandinavia, North America, Europe and Iberia aren’t. It contains many peoples with common concerns by virtue of its geography. Over time those peoples formed tribes, nations, alliances, commonwealths, pacts and finally sovereign states, but you can still see the ghosts in modern borders. It has been patronised as Eastern Europe, fit only for plumbers, but it has…
The great Scottish comedian Hector Nicol used to tell a joke about a signalman in the Highlands who applied for a promotion and had to sit a test. This consisted of ever more outlandish scenarios about what he would do if two trains were running towards each other on the same line of track while a series of disasters befell his signalling equipment. The punchline of the joke, after his signal box had caught fire, the points had been jammed…