A Goalless draw – and memories to last a lifetime

George IV paid his last visit to the Royal Pavilion in Brighton in 1827. He loved the town and he loved his Oriental pleasure palace even more. His successor William IV was also very fond of Brighthelmstone, as it was originally called, but Queen Victoria and Albert (who complained about very little) did not share the enthusiasm of her uncles.

Brighton was always different. For a start, there were ‘over-dressed and immodest social butterflies’, even as long ago as 1827. Well, there had to be if the town was to resist the rival attractions of Bournemouth and Eastbourne, thereby justifying the creation of the new railway line from London in the 1840s. Victoria and Albert had decamped to the Isle of Wight by then.

I salute the Pavilion as I drive past on my way to the racecourse. It was where I did my first-ever broadcast, way back around 1970. You walked up some winding stairs at the back and came to an old, tiny BBC studio. The late Peter Brackley was broadcasting for the first time as well, probably for Radio Brighton. Brighton 0 Preston North End 0 was the final score and I really wasn’t very good at all, reading from a hastily written script, as most people do when they start out. It takes a while to become more conversational.

Peter was a fine broadcaster who soon joined the Sports Unit in London, as did I in 1982. He was a tragic figure, already looking after his ailing wife when a heart attack laid him low. We thought he’d make a full recovery but it wasn’t to be and he died six years ago. I saw hardened broadcasters in tears and the Brighton faithful held up a giant banner in his honour at the next home game. He was a committed Seagulls supporter all his life.

My early broadcasts were for a BBC Bristol regional programme called Sports Page, which aired just after Alastair Cook’s Letter From America on Saturday evenings. He was a master broadcaster, of course, and a hard act to follow. I suppose I improved a bit and I loved Sports Page, which always found time for racing, especially if there was a west country chaser with designs on Cheltenham or Aintree.

I must be honest and say this was when I was happiest. Sometimes I’d report on Southampton or Portsmouth from the Southampton studios close to the old Terminus station, a matter of yards away  from the Platform pub  –  ‘Not all who wander are lost’ is the J R Tolkein quotation on the wooden sign hanging from the ceiling these days. Stroll a bit further and you have La Regata, a Spanish tapas bar where I’ve been known to pen the odd piece or two. Right next door is Ennio’s, a superb Italian, but you need the results to go your way at Goodwood or Brighton before venturing in.

‘We can’t return, we can only look, behind from where we came;

And go round and round, and round in the circle game’.

Yes, Joni had it about right in The Circle Game and well over fifty years on I still wander the same Southampton streets and think about those early naïve match reports and pints of brown and mild in the dockers’ pubs in the Chapel area. All gone now, like the Floating Bridge and parts of Woolston across the water.

That was where every able-bodied man, woman and child turned out spitfires as rapidly as possible in a race against time before the Luftwaffe blasted the Vickers-Supermarine Works out of existence. .

The Terminus station has gone as well and although South Western House (a luxury hotel once frequented by Hollywood stars and later home to Cunard staff and the BBC studios) survived, it was converted into flats in 1999. The most imposing building in the area these days is a Stanley casino.

In the end, everything is bound to change. The Portuguese have a word ‘saudades’, which means ‘a gentle longing for what was and is no longer’. Well, like Marcel Proust I’m quite adept at revisiting places which haven’t changed all that much. The furlong pole at Brighton is a good example and is much the same as the day I came down from Cambridge and Boyst, trained by Tom Waugh, won the opening apprentices’ handicap at 8/1.

Not only that but he was 2lbs ‘well in’ according to the fading yellow Raceform card. (The romantic in me calls it a card but it wouldn’t have stood much chance in the rain and was actually all paper. I didn’t care about that but I was miffed (did we say that fifty years ago? Probably not) when it ceased publication.

After thirty-nine years Nailsea hasn’t much to offer me now. But a certain core decency after the life I’ve led insists that madame must call the shots. She loves the house and garden and that’s the end of it. Otherwise I’d probably live somewhere between Southampton and Brighton, write pieces in the Regency Tavern as well as La Regata, and wander the front in Brighthelmstone, wondering if the latticed ironwork and cast-iron pillars of Madeira Terrace had been spruced up a bit.

And if they hadn’t, I really wouldn’t mind at all.

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