Don't read me the time. The time tells you nothing. Give me the distance and then give me the time and I'll tell you where he finished.
Every bird on this board flew to a different address. That is the whole difficulty and it is not a difficulty at all once you accept it. There is no finishing line. There is one liberation point and sixty-one gardens, and the only figure that can be set beside another figure is metres per minute: this loft's own surveyed distance, divided by this bird's flying time from nine fourteen. Nine fourteen for all of them. Everything on this table starts at nine fourteen.
The seal is cut here, at this table, by an official, with everybody watching, and not one second before. Until the drum comes out and I read the impression, a man can say whatever he likes about his own bird across this trestle and it is worth exactly nothing to me. I have a column for a struck time. I have no column for what somebody shouted.
Rate. Every clock was set against the master last night and checked against the master again when it was opened this afternoon. Whatever it gained or lost over that span gets spread across the span in proportion and taken off the strike — a clock eleven seconds fast over the race gives its man his eleven seconds back, honestly distributed, not in a lump. Loft 9's clock came in a hundred and seventeen seconds fast. That is a great deal. It is also entirely legal, and prorated it is worth him nearly two minutes, and it is precisely why we prorate instead of standing here arguing. Switch the correction off up there and watch what happens to him.
Distances. Straight line, surveyed, fixed by the federation and not re-measured since, which means a man who moved his shed forty metres down the garden is racing on a figure that is a lie until somebody puts it in writing. Four were re-measured this spring because four men wrote in. The man from Houthalen — loft 52 — has been telling me his distance is short since 1961 and has never once put a word of it on paper. I cannot enter a figure in a column because a man says it at me over a trestle table. Write it down, Constant. It takes four lines.
Trapping. The clock does not record when your bird crosses your garden. It records when the ring is off the leg and the handle is turned. Ninety seconds on the shed roof looking at you has cost more men more places than the wind ever has, and there is a slider on any card that will show you exactly what it costs in metres a minute and in places. Try it on somebody near the top.
Wind. A crosswind is worse than a headwind and I will say that to anybody. A headwind is honest, it takes it off the whole lot of them equally. A crosswind puts drift into them, and the lofts on the eastern edge fly a longer real path than the straight line I have written down here, and there is no column on this card for that either, so nobody gets it.
Results at five. And somebody find the second pencil.