Wet Saturday afternoon.

Her television did not have Seven programmed for some reason so I set it up for her, just so she could watch the grand final tonight. It was Saturday afternoon, and had been raining and the race was coming up, and on the screen hi-vis-vested racing officials were bending over the turf on the home turn as if looking for a lost contact lens; but they were probably testing the wetness of the track. In a little while the camera cut to an old guy wearing a blue scarf over a grey sweater on a makeshift stage facing the empty grandstand. He sang ‘Horses’, probably because this was a race track on Cox Plate day. 

Then the horses jumped, and two minutes of flying mud later, Glen Boss pumped the air having got his horse around the desperate corners of Moonee Valley quicker than the others. The one hundredth Cox Plate, and no-one there except horses and jockeys, a rock band from the 1970s, and the track officials. I turned the volume up to 100, as she is going deaf now, and went home.