'STOPPED in the straight when the race was his own'—even
if commentators had not forgotten their Kipling they would no doubt have felt that his comment, 'cur to the bone,' was hardly appropriate to last Saturday's saddest story. My own bet on the unfortunate Devon Loch had a curious history, which convinces me that to tinker with the future is to invite frustra- tion. Some weeks ago I heard about an amateur psychologist who tried to find the winner of last year's Grand National by hypnotising his wife and instructing her to dream the race in advance. This she did. She could not catch the winner's name, but she saw its number clearly : it was 10. Neither of them knew anything about racing, so they simply put a modest bet on the tenth horse in the newspaper list of runners. Needless to say, they lost their money. Not until much later did they find that Quare Times, the winner, was in fact No. 10. The story of this abortive experiment got around and it so impressed an acquaintance of mine that he sought out a psychologist a few days before last Saturday's race and had himself hypno- tised. The hypnotist's instructions were to 'follow the race' and follow it my acquaintance did in his trance from a position behind the horses—like the launches in the Boat Race. All he could see at the end was that three horses, out on their own, went up and over the last fence, and that the colours of the jockey on the leading horse, which was going strong. were blue and yellow vertical stripes. The nearest to this in the actual race were the blue and buff vertical stripes of the Queen Mother's colours; and this was enough, I thought, to justify an each way bet. When the commentator announced that three horses had gone up and over the last fence, and that the leader was Devon Loch, going very strong indeed and surely a certainty, I began to count my winnings. The rest you know.
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