a letter to my literary/journalist hero, alastair down.

​There is no doubt in my mind that you (Alastair Down) sit at the top of the pyramid of dedicated racing correspondents, greater, even, than John Lawrence, Brough Scott and Sir Peter O’Sullevan, a far better writer than he was commentator. Your absence as a regular contributor to the Racing Post diminishes my appreciation of the paper as though Tom Lee has many fine writers in his stable, none can fill the void created by your unavailability. I hoped initially you were on sabbatical but alas not. Our love of this sport, especially National Hunt, is equal, though your penmanship is superior to mine by a ratio of several thousand to one. We spoke once, not that you’ll remember. My hobby horse is the names of racehorses and you surprised me one evening by phoning me in response to a letter I must have had published in the Post that morning. You were broadly in agreement with me, though I think I saddened you by suggesting the name Rondetto might be reused at any time as he had not won any of the races that allowed him the honour of having his name die with him. You could have called me a silly-ass and torn my argument to shreds and still I would recall fondly the night the great Alastair Down phoned me.
It goes without saying that the return of the Racing Post was as much as a delight to me as you, though as journalism is your profession, I suspect your delight was on a whole different scale. Tom Lee chose well in deciding it should be you to cut the red ribbon on the paper’s rebirth. Who else could he chose? Apart from himself. He displayed great promise as a writer, didn’t he, until he was head-hunted upstairs? A better writer than editor? I couldn’t say. What do you think?
I think the only time I have taken issue with you was after Red Marauder’s Grand National when I considered you to have lost your sense of the ridiculous, your sense of fun, your knowledge of the race history. It was the Grand National, after all, that sort of thing is supposed to happen occasionally at Aintree, Alastair. Sadly, that sort of thing will never happen again at Aintree, to the detriment of the history of the race.
I sort of take issue with you today. Not all of your column but the opening paragraphs. We, the British people, are not presently engaged in a war. I know you are keen on your history, the World Wars in particular, and when you reference battles and war heroes you raise your game to even dizzier heights of composition. I am also aware that the Prime Minister is aware he walks in the footsteps of his great hero Winston Churchill and during this term of history I will always refer to as the ‘Bill Gates sponsored Global Health Crisis’, or words and phrases of a similar nature, he often descends into a micro-mimicry of him. But we do not live in time of war. We live in a time of deception and any journalist worth his or her salt, even a racing correspondent, should never parrot government statistics without first conducting his or her own research to attain the accuracy and veracity of what Westminster is telling the public.
39,000 people have not died of Covid-19 and to compare that number with those who attended Royal Ascot and Cheltenham on BetVictor Gold Cup day tallies with a journalist who is towing the party line. I wish to all that is holy that this ‘state of emergency’ would go away and stop inflicting its callous menace on us all and that I could keep this site for what it is intended. I say to people all the time, I did in the bank this morning, ‘don’t get me started on this subject because I have research it and I know that what is going on has very little to do with a virus’. But, Alastair, you have started me up.
World-wide, 48% of people who have died with or involving (but not of) Covid-19 had 3 or more morbidities. That is W.H.O. fact. 25% had 2 or more morbidities. 26% had 1 morbidity. Do the math, please.
The reason these facts are relevant, why Alastair you were mistaken to refer to the number of supposed deaths in this country (the mortality rate has not risen during the period since March, by the way, when the W.H.O. downgraded Covid-19 from a highly-infectious decease to one similar to mumps or measles), is that it is because of the lies and half-truths, the agenda being conducted behind a screen of virus mortality, that we have had no racing for 76-days, why racing is only allowed take place without spectators, why the economy of the country is being kicked down the street as if it as worthless as horse dung. When ‘we’ celebrated the heroics of the ‘men on board the little ships’ that saved 300,000 from the beaches of Dunkirk we were under a suppression unseen in this country in its long history. The irony was seemingly lost on every journalist in the country.
Let’s not thank Boris Johnson for allowing us to have our sport back but press him for compensation for the harm he and the ‘Bill Gates sponsored pandemic’ has inflicted on us. To quote your own words back at you, Alastair “Somewhere there lies the scale of the toll.”