Red button news

BH is rather cross that BBC are, or certainly want, to withdraw what she knows as the red button news service. A  news feed which serves her, as a person whose smart phone lives in its box, well.

This morning she found a news item, the headline to which said 'Epsom Derby moved to July', or words to that effect. Which we thought a bit odd: the Epsom Derby draws in hundreds of thousands of people from all over the country, by no means all young, to squash them into a small part of the Downs and the surrounding hostelries - of which I am sorry to say that South Hatch is no longer one. A place which used to make a very convenient comfort break on the way up or on the way down. The service was good, the beer was good and they took bets. And not too many people seemed to know about it.

But such a squash, even in what might conceivably turn out to be the aftermath of the current epidemic,  does not seem like a good idea at all. And it is hard to see how you could run the race at all, on what is a very open (and a very special, rather difficult) course, without lots of people turning up to watch.

I asked Bing, and the story there seemed to be cancellation, rather the postponement. Digging deeper, I got to reference 1, which talks of the next Derby meeting being planned for 2021, with very vague talk of perhaps something being possible later this year. I failed to find any reference to July.

In any event, I can't see it happening myself. If for no other reason, than that a trainer is not going to want to work his prize horse up to racing pitch for some uncertain, not to say unknown, date late summer. He - or she - is just going to coast until the coast becomes clear, as it were.

Which all goes to show that headline news, even from the BBC, can be misleading. Not many stories can be decently captured in six words - or even 250 characters, thought to be the Twitter limit - where brevity, rather than truth, is of the essence.

PS: along the way I found that the websites of both the 'Daily Mail' and the 'Daily Mirror' are so festooned with animated advertisements as to make them unusable, at least by me. And worse than the flickering, some of them even burst into sound.

Reference 1: https://www.thejockeyclub.co.uk/epsom/events-tickets/epsom-derby/.

Reference 2: https://www.thejockeyclub.co.uk/the-racing/racing-news/2020/03/british-horseracing-suspended-until-the-end-of-april/.

Reference 3: https://www.britishhorseracing.com/. 'The British Horseracing Authority has confirmed that all horseracing in Britain will be suspended with effect from Wednesday 18 March until further notice'. From the horse's mouth, as it were.