My afternoon in a Gallic version of Betfred

For the Cheltenham Festival I received the customary tipster circular from my pal Soapy Joe. Soapy’s most convincing credential as a horse-racing tipster is that he is banned from every high street bookmaker in the land because he takes too much money off the poor souls. I slept with him once. I woke up in an upstairs bedroom of a Gloucestershire stately home on the second morning of our week-long Cheltenham Festival house party, pieced together where I was, and why, and saw, sitting up in the next bed, Soapy in his stripy pyjamas listening to the commentary of a horse race in Dubai or somewhere on a pocket radio. ‘Good morning, Soapy,’ I said. ‘How did you get on yesterday by the way?’ He squinted up at the ceiling to make a quick calculation and said that he had finished the day roughly £67,000 to the good. Among Soapy’s emailed tips for Gold Cup day was a horse running in Albert Bartlett Novices’ Hurdle called Black Hercules.

Soapy never claims that if such and such a horse doesn’t win he’ll eat his trilby. He merely points you towards horses that have betting market ‘value’. His emails are clinical and unemotional. If there is a red-hot, nailed-on, odds-on favourite in a race, he will say that while he placed his own bet on the horse the day it was foaled, and is therefore riding on astronomically favourable odds, unfortunately they have now shortened to the point where you have to bet the farm to get back the price of a round of Guinness, and his best advice is to steer well clear. I had a look to see what the Racing Post had to say about Black Hercules, however, and I was encouraged to read that owner Graham Wylie expressed high hopes for his entry’s chances in the gruelling three-miler because, he said, the horse is a ‘monster’.