Living History

A Ripper Day in Rippon

It was a working man’s day out. The day started off with breakfast at 7:00—which involved putting beer on cornflakes and a gammon fry up. Then it was onto the coach to Rippon racecourse where we teamed up, myself and George.

On our way onto the course, we were sold bogus tips—the sellers claimed them to be ‘special tips of the day’, but they were in fact cuttings from the newspaper, stuck in an envelope. These supposedly hot tips cost the grand sum of two pounds each, which in them days was about eight weeks salary (joking). The purchase of these two ‘hot tips’ caused uncontrollable amounts of laughter from my friends.

The race meeting consisted of six races, and the stipulation for punters was that you had to drink one pint per race. Before the first race, while the horses were parading, myself and George engaged in a heated argument over the bulk and stature of horses—i.e. me liking the skinny one. Someone in close proximity commented that if this was us at the first race, by the third it would be a boxing match.

As it happened, the horse—my skinny horse, which was “completely undernourished” apparently—romped home, leaving every other horse in its dust.

Come the third race, Belforte, the first of the hot bogus tips of the day, decided it was going to win at twenty to one—causing the need for more liquid refreshment and an extreme amount of joviality on my part. Progressing through to the final race of the day, my second hot tip of the day, Blair, decided it was also going to go against the grain, and come home—which goes to show you that not all bogus tips are bogus, and that luck does favour the stupid.

At the end of the day, who was the real mug punter?

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