"My Racing Problems No.2 The Fatted Napes"

Now that the racing season gathers to its exciting climax, a unique racing problem that has interested me for a number of years again presents itself for solution.

You are quite wrong if you imagine that my problem has anything to do with my own puny efforts to "spot stone morals" with a view to pecuniary gain. It is far more impersonal than that. Punting to me presents no problem at all! It is a perfectly simple process.

When I wish to have a little flutter I merely bid a last farewell to a ten shilling note and give it to a bookmaker. (At the precise moment of its passing one gently intones over the ten shillings the name of some favored horse.) For this sum the bookmaker sells me a little piece of pasteboard bearing his name and certain indecipherable characters that look like Coptic Roots, or something. This piece of pasteboard I cling to religiously -- even fanatically until the race is over. Then I tear it into little pieces, throw these to all or any of the four winds that happen to be blowing at the time, and the transaction is completed.

I have heard it rumored that, should the animal I fancy win the race (which is absurd) the bookmaker will then buy back my piece of pasteboard at a price more or less in advance of what it cost me. Some day I should like to have an opportunity of testing this contention.

But, even without this happy consummation, the mere purchase of the pasteboard provides me with a mild thrill. For, if the horse I have chosen manages to beat at least one other horse in the race, a distinct glow of satisfaction flatters my prescience and unexpectedly shrewd judgment.

I should like to know how to capitalise this; for I feel that I have a unique flair for selecting certain horses that are frequently well able to run faster than certain other horses, or at least one other horse.

But my real problem is far more baffling than anything presented by the simple mechanical rights of punting. It is this: -

Why is it that a large proportion of regular racecourse frequenters have extremely fat necks?

I know immediately what you would answer: that thin necks are also much in evidence; but I hope to be able to explain that also at a later date.

I wish it understood that I exclude from this enquiry all owners and trainers.

The men I refer to are very evidently gamblers who "follow the game" with a queer devotion worthy of an even nobler aim; and their fat necks are abnormally fat. Look about you next time you are on a racecourse.

I had taken my problem to various learned men without getting much satisfaction; and then I remembered Percy Podgrass. Percy is a friend of mine and a scientist of sorts - of very many sorts, in fact; he attends guild lectures.

I have propounded my perplexing problem to Percy (alliteratively, like that) and he has promised to chew it over and bring back to me a working hypothesis. At least, I think it is a hypothesis and certainly not a hypothenuse; though Percy himself laughingly referred to it, with his quaint, diffident humor, as his hippopotamus.

Those thoughtful people, to whom the matter is of interest, will remember that, on a recent day, I submitted to my friend, Percy Podgrass, the well-known scientific dilettante, a rather baffling racing problem upon which I had stumbled almost by accident. Since its publication, I learn, the matter has aroused intense interest amongst those more highly-cultured members of the sporting fraternity to whom abstract questions are far more exciting than any sordid consideration of concrete gain acquired by wagering on sporting events.

The number of such people may not be large, but their enthusiasm is flattering.

My problem, it will be remembered, is, or rather was, this: "Why is it that a large proportion of chronic racecourse gamblers, of a certain type, have abnormally fat necks while the residue of their number have napes abnormally thin?"

Percy has now been concentrating on the problem for some forty-eight hours -- allowing time off for sleep, meals, snacks, spots, golf, bridge, face-massage and so forth. Today, he came to me with shining eyes and what I believe to be, not only a feasible, but a highly ingenious and probable solution.

Its announcement will, I make bold to say, create a world-wide sensation among biologists, zoologists, psychologists and other apologists for the existence of humanity wherever it is discussed.

And this is what my pal Percy propounds:

Certain animals (he explains), inured by their environment or habitat (nice word) to alternating periods of plenty and poverty, have been, after aeons of patient evolution, equipped by wise Nature with a remarkable gift. This is the ability to store, in convenient portions of their bodies, during periods of plenty, a certain fatty substance of high nutritive value. Upon this substance they are later able to draw when a sudden scarcity of their natural sustenance forces them, as it were, to go on the dole.

It is Percy's considered opinion that the chronic gamblers in question have now definitely joined the ranks of these mammals, so highly favored by Nature. The fat-naped ones (he declares) are those at present at or near a peak of prosperity. Those with dwindling necks are enduring the temporary privations of a "tough spin" or a "rotten trot" because of a too sanguine predilection for "hairy goats".

Further (as Percy points out), by staggering or alternating these periods, all-wise Nature saves these too acquisitive punters from themselves. For, if they had their own passionate desire; and the heyday of prosperity were unwisely prolonged, their necks would explode.

The solution (Percy tells me) came to him in his bath, almost miraculously. Using the loofah briskly, he was humming the words of an old gambler's song, when a certain couplet struck him like a blow. All lovers of literature will remember the significant lines:- "One day you're a great big winner;
Next day you ain't got no dinner."

And there, as Percy says, he had it in a knutshell, Q.E.D., or is it ipsy dixit?

But I was still not wholly convinced.

Always meticulously careful to submit scientific theories to the most rigid tests, and to clear up every lurking doubt, I cited a case.

Many years ago, I told him, I myself had a rather inexplicable racing win, involving quite a large sum, yet my neck remained thin - or, as vulgar friends have it, scraggy.

Percy said the thing bore its own solution on the face of it. The fatty substance had been secreted, he maintained, not perhaps, in the neck, but a little higher up; and it has never since been dissipated.

Podgrass is a man I usually admire greatly; but there are moments when I suspect Percy of persiflage.

I shall be glad, later, to afford readers the benefit of the Podgrassian research.