Today is my birthday and I celebrated with an outing to the Derby with several friends. Nothing to do with swimming I hear you say, but we missed swimclub for it, and most swimclub members were there, so I feel it has relevance and must be blogged!
After a week of very dodgy weather it somehow managed to get it’s act together today and was absolutely lovely – sunny and hot. A quick blast round bptt this morning as usual followed by some very quick showers and we were off to the station. No dressing up was involved as our tickets were for the cheapest part of the race course – except the bit that’s actually free.
We timed our arrival at the station perfectly and didn’t have to try and make the ticket machine go faster at all! Honest… Anyway we caught the train and I spent the journey unwrapping lots of lovely presents.
We arrived at Epsom to be confronted by 2 huge queues, one for taxis, one for buses. Being the fit and healthy people we are, we decided to walk. This turned out to be a rather massive uphill trek in the boiling sunshine, but we got there, went in and found a lovely picnic spot.
Having bought the cheapo tickets I was expecting there to be hundreds of very tall people between me and the action. However I was pleasantly surprised that in fact we were right on the rail, also with a great view of a very large screen. We scoffed the picnic and started placing our bets for the first of the 7 races. In addition to my usual strategy of choosing jockeys with pink, purple and/or stars on their jumpers, I decided to go for horses with names that sounded like porn stars- of which there were a surprisingly high number!
Rufus and David seemed to do rather well on the betting, the rest of us not so well and proceeded to make our nearest tote ‘Rich Racing’ considerably richer! At least Frankie Dettori won and made us some cash.
In between races we studied the form in The Racing Post (ie checked out jumpers and names), scoffed more picnic, and did lots of people watching. There were some very scary sights to be seen, hot weather always brings out the worst sartorial decisions in the Britsh public!
So when it was all over we briefly considered visiting the ‘chav-carnival’ that Danny had walked through from the station. However as the rides we could see looked extremely vomit-inducing we decided to go home instead
A really enjoyable birthday, thank you to everyone who shared it with me.
Swim Club 