August 20, 2012

Cocktail Talk: Whip Hand

When growing up, we owned a bunch of horses. And yeah, I showed them and all that (though not nearly as well as my sister). But, even with this bit of background, and my admiration for men in a certain type of suit, I never have spent much time at the track (that’s the horse track, for those of you still thinking Olympics). Which is probably one of the reasons I haven’t read much Dick Francis, who writes a lot of his mysteries around the tracks of England and the folks that hang out at or near them. But when on an extended trip to Italy once I was in a need of a book, and there was a Dick Francis number where I was staying, and so I read it, and liked it pretty darn well. It was called Whip Hand, and was horse-y, and had the following quote which I was quite fond of:

We met most weeks at noon in the upstairs bar of the Cavandish Hotel, where a pink gin for him and a whiskey and water for me now stood on prim little mats beside a bowl of peanuts.

–Dick Francis, Whip Hand

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