I’d booked tickets for a couple of days at the Grand National meeting last summer, soon after the football fixtures came out confirming that the Boro had an away game. These days I rarely know what I’ll be doing ten months into the future but sometimes you just have to make your plans and see if they work out.
As it turned out, the Grand National meeting coincided with a few days of public holiday in Saudi Arabia and so I headed back to the UK for a short break. Jen and I broke the journey to Liverpool with an overnight stay in Sheffield for a Paul Weller gig at the City Hall.
He was great, as ever. I’m not overly keen on long gigs, but the twenty-nine-song set flew by. He drew heavily on new stuff, which I’m fine with, playing just the two Jam songs and three from the Style Council days. He could quite easily have played an entirely different twenty-nine songs from his back-catalogue with no drop in quality. Who else could do that? Could McCartney get away with just two Beatles songs and three from Wings? And if he did, could he swap out the entire rest of the set for twenty-four different solo songs to those he usually plays? I doubt it.
It was amusing, as ever, to see all the old blokes dressed as Weller, or even better, with their Weller haircuts. Dressing like Weller is fine as most of the stuff that he wears is more than decent clobber. But don’t do it at one of his gigs, fellas, you’re not cosplaying at a Star Trek convention. Save it for popping out to Aldi.
Next morning we drove across Snake Pass to our hotel in Chester. I picked it because it was a reasonably easy journey by train to the racecourse. The hotel looked ok from the outside, but it was one of those places that caters primarily for coach tours and so wasn’t up to much. I felt sorry for all those American tourists calling in there between Loch Ness and Stonehenge.
After dropping off our bags we caught the train to Aintree. It soon filled up with smartly dressed young people pre-gaming on Echo Falls rose. Our tickets were for the Princess Royal Roof, which is somewhere that Paul and I had watched the National from back in 2008. It seemed a lot busier on this occasion, despite it costing over a hundred quid and it not even being Grand National day.
It was Ladies Day and so a certain amount of dressing up went on. I’d been expecting to see some Peaky Blinder blokes, but that fashion seems to have slipped into the past. There was a good atmosphere about the place although the next day I read reports that some fighting had gone on.
The drinks were expensive. Maybe I’m getting out of touch, but over twenty quid for a pint of Worthingtons, a can of wine and a lemonade mixer struck me as outrageous. As did the scrum to get served. We switched to champagne at eighty-five quid a bottle from a dedicated bar instead, which didn’t seem too bad in comparison to the individual drinks, and I could buy it without having to stick my elbows out.
With just the one winner all day I avoided the scrum at the pay-out counters too.
Trail of the Lion King 