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Cheltenham Festival: 20 years of pleasure and pain

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I am ridiculously excited for this year’s Cheltenham Festival. The lockdowns merely emphasise the absence of other distractions. I’ve updated stats summarising my punting performance at every Festival since my debut in 2000. I’ve shared this with Bacchy, my original Festival partner in crime; and decided to stick it up on this blog as well. Warts and all. Looking at the thing in its entirety, the cliché ‘roller-coaster’ springs to mind. There shouldn’t be this much red in the sheet. That said, across the decades (!) it seems I've contrived to scrape an average nestling in the black and an overall Return On Investment (ROI) of 14%. The few sentences of narrative against each Festival are to provide a bit of context because as old age creeps in, I’m beginning to muddle up the various years. As I wrote them, some of the memories and moments made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, possibly more so with the passage of time. I’m always surprised how little I end up staking. The a