Last year, at the time the Grand National was run, I was at the house of my nephew and his wife who were holding a race viewing party for the family before we all went on to the, er, U.K. premiere of my play, Soldiering On. I'd bet on State of Play, after going to a sobering rehearsal a couple of nights before, and won about thirty pounds. The play was well received and I held the winning raffle ticket at the theatre fund-raiser, but that was then, when Jupiter was on my Sun, and this is now, with Saturn slowly moving away from an opposition to Mercury before turning round and coming back to do it again in September.
With transiting Venus in Gemini conjunct Natal Uranus in the first on Grand National day this year, the mission was two-fold: to watch the race one way or another - TV or online - and to put money on State of Play, who was running again. (I'd been looking at horses and runners and odds for at least a week beforehand.) Several of the U.K. online bookies offered punters the ability to watch the race online if a bet was placed, which got me very excited until I found out U.K. betting shops can't accept money from the U.S. Online bookies in the U.S. are happy to take your money but don't broadcast the race, and also require you to state whether you're betting to win or to show BEFORE you wager your moolah, I discovered AFTER, by mistake, betting more than I want to mention for State of Play to win. (He didn't.)
All of the above *research* was done the day before the race, which took place at 11:15 am EST on Saturday. I'd given up by then on watching, as the National is broadcast only by the BBC and is carefully guarded, but had found its radio sports channel, and was listening to the build up to the start. At about 10:55 I did one final Google search for "Watch Grand National Live Online" and up popped a "Watch TV on your Computer $49 One Time Only Unlimited Access Fee." With my usual careful consideration and forethought, I reached for my wallet while clicking download, and a minute later started to download a program that would take eight minutes to get into my computer, ignoring the screen that told me to use Chrome.
Eight minutes later, when the TV watching application wouldn't start, I downloaded Chrome and suffered through another eight minutes or so, watching the clock get closer to 11:15 by the second ha ha. This time the program, Satellite Direct, launched but told me I needed updates of two supporting programs, and while I was looking for those I was eyeing the clock and congratulating myself that I'd at least found good old radio coverage on BBC Five. Just as I started on the second update, an announcer's voice informed me that the race segment (!) of the Grand National wouldn't be broadcast due to copyright infringement, and the radio went dead.
The next ten minutes were given over to a frantic scramble from newspaper site to newspaper site, looking for live blogging of the race. Saturday was also the day that Mercury opposed Chiron for me, and I got a full taste of what THAT one feels like when I finally discovered which horse had won the National - a rank outsider called, yes, that's right, you can't make this stuff up - Neptune Collonges.
No comments:
Post a Comment