Visceral reality of a day at the Grand National

WHEN I was a boy, I had a dream. I dreamt that one day, I would be able to get into my own car, and drive off to a race meeting.

My father, or the father of a friend of mine, would sometimes bring us to race meetings, and I would find the experience so intoxicating, I would curse the fact that I could not get there unless accompanied by an adult.

Some day, I vowed, I will be able to make my own way to the Curragh, or Leopardstown, or the Phoenix Park.

I will get all the morning papers, and I will see that there’s a seven-race card that day at Limerick Junction, and I will take a notion to go there, just because I can. And then I will be free. It was not much, really, that I was asking of the baleful gods, and yet I never did live that dream — eventually I found that I was falling out of love, somewhat, with the horses, and certainly it seemed at times that they had fallen out of love with me.

But still, the fact that I had such visions of paradise in the first place, may come as a slight surprise to readers who would be accustomed to my frequent warnings about the gambling phenomenon, in particular the online variety.

So let us just say that I have been coming to this from a position of some familiarity, even of empathy, and therefore I went to the Grand National meeting at Fairyhouse last Monday with a quiet mind, or at least as quiet as a mind can reasonably be in these times.

Indeed, I am increasingly inclined to see the act of going to any race meeting as being so different in terms of basic procedure to the insidious daily grind of online gambling, there is something to be found there that is virtually educational.

First you have to leave the house, in itself an extraordinarily big ask for the multitudes consumed with betting on Vietnamese football in the morning.

You have all the distractions of “a day out”, all the more diverting on Grand National day with the big crowd, the hurdygurdies, the brass band, and a personal appearance by Enda Kenny.

Crucially, you have the phenomenon whereby there are these people calling themselves bookmakers standing there waiting to accept your money, which you are obliged to hand to them in the form of legal tender, actual notes.

There are many young men, in particular, who have been betting with nothing but plastic money, who may find some of these scenes disturbing.

And as they take their places in the stands, alongside other human beings, they may also be affected by the raw emotions all around them, that visceral roaring as the horses arrive at the final furlong, and the commentator calls out the names of the leaders, and those that are not too far behind.

Just being there, at a public event, observing other individuals struggling with their own weaknesses, and those of their horses, would tend to give those punters whose experience is largely confined to the virtual reality of the online game, a sense of the endless vulnerability of man in general. And especially of the particular man, or woman, entering the parade ring wearing colourful clothing, who is expected to stay on top of a horse jumping a lot of big fences for about three-and-a-half miles.

I would not go so far as to suggest that for the youth with a gambling problem, a day at the races might constitute a form of therapy — but I wouldn’t be entirely discouraging that notion either, for what is, after all, a most intractable form of addiction.

Just the thought of having to start the long journey home after backing seven straight losers at the track is a more chastening experience than merely closing the laptop and going to bed.

And yet, so radically has the game been changed by our old friend the internet, to the punter who has never known anything but the online experience, there may now be some essential confusion between what is real, and what is unreal.

Nor are they entirely wrong to be thinking that the “real” event is not necessarily happening at Fairyhouse, it is happening on computer screens throughout the world, that there are people intimately connected to these races who have no idea where Fairyhouse is, and who don’t care.

They’re just looking for something to be betting on, for them that is the only reason for this Fairyhouse to exist.

So all that paraphernalia you find at the track, the people dressed up with a few gin-and-tonics on board, the parading and the presenting of trophies and the aroma of hamburgers, the bookies in human form, all that “reality” in a paradoxical way is starting to seem like a kind of theme park experience. A monument to a way of life, certainly to a way of gambling, that is gone with the wind.

It may be a trip down memory lane for the likes of me, mourning the loss of little things, like the multicoloured bookies’ dockets which have been replaced by dreary-looking receipts.

But in the present day you can’t help forming the illusion that this is a kind of a false front for the real action, which is happening in cyberspace.

‘A day at the races can now feel like a theme park experience’