Orlando Gough. 

1.

Shortly before Christmas we went to the ghastly Excel Stadium in South London to see Adrenaline, a horse show directed by my exuberant and uncompromisingly French friend Roland Bréand. My wife Jo and I are horse agnostics, but we went with her sister Lucy who is a brilliant horsewoman. Roland gave us ‘VIP’ tickets, which meant that we had the right to arrive early, sit in a tacky enclosure in the airport-like foyer, and have a free glass of Cava and some of the most disgusting food I’ve ever tasted, food which must originally have been cooked several years before, the kind of food where you find yourself calculating the probability of ending up alive after eating it. Bits of solid material (meat?) served with jam, mushy fish with mushy chips and mushy peas… The other ‘VIP’s looked entirely content with all this horrible stuff. Considering that they had paid an eye-watering £145 each for their tickets, this showed remarkable forbearance on their part. I thought we were supposed to be a nation of whingers…

Orlando Gough. 

There was a complex ritual which started a couple of weeks before Christmas, when my father and his friend Keith would go off to the meat and poultry auction in Heathfield to buy The Bird. My father didn’t drive, and Heathfield is (by the standards of South-East England) in the middle of nowhere, so Keith and his van, normally used for transporting antiques, were crucial. They’d bid for various birds, including The Bird itself, the largest turkey that would fit in my parents’ oven. Bidding had to be done with care, as there was live poultry on sale as well, and my father had once or twice been obliged to slaughter several chickens himself; but generally speaking he and Keith were alert punters. There was a lot of banter with the auctioneer, who knew them well. And then back at home an elaborate post-mortem about the price, which was either infuriatingly high or thrillingly low…