GRAND NATIONAL UK

I was on Talk Sport Radio UK this morning at around 9.40am, UK time, explaining why it is so very difficult to pick a horse race winner!

Legend tells, amongst the global community of astrologers, of specialists who can do this successfully but, despite my best effort to prize such secrets from my colleagues and contemporaries, I have never managed to get anyone to reveal their secrets. And believe me, I have tried - even down to plying the most likely experts with vodka in the hope that this will loosen their tongues!

The reason it is all so tricky is because, to employ proper traditional methods would require the casting of 120 horoscopes. 40 for the riders. 40 for the runners. And then a further 40 'combined charts' for each pair. Once the tireless astrologer has gone to all that trouble, he or she had better be good enough to read and compare every single chart, without a single error. No wonder, if others in my profession have ever found a successful shortcut, they have kept it to themselves.  

The closest I have managed to glean about how a such shortcut might work is a system of calculating the lunar aspect that falls closest to the race time. You then compare the symbolism of this aspect to the name of each horse in turn.

The race, this afternoon, falls closest to a completion of a square (or right angle) between the Moon and Mercury. If (and I stress that this is a very big IF) that system works, some likely names might include:

Tidal Bay (The Moon rules tides - and bays. Mercury rules races)

Hunt Ball (mercury governs searches, the Moon is a ball in the sky)

Mr Moonshine
 
Vintage Star

Rose of The Moon

Twirling Magnet (The Moon's gravitational pull on the Earth could be considered magnetic and Mercury's symbolism, at a stretch, can probably be linked to twirling)

Like I say, it is tricky. I haven't even thought here, about the horses with foreign names and what these might translate to. Nor am I offering ANY promise at all that this particular technique is tried, tested or even half reliable. I've never even explored it because I believe that betting is a fools game.
Never, under any circumstances, should any of us ever gamble a sum that is greater than we can happily afford to kiss goodbye to.

If you've got a guess, it is not likely to be any better than mine.
Unless, I suppose, things somehow turn out differently...  in the Long Run.