That sinking feeling

For example, you could try staging a production of Schindler's List on Ice at the Wembley Arena, or why not buy a ticket for the National Lottery, which, at odds of 25,000,000 to 1 against, remains a triumph of hope over logic?

Alternatively, you could waste thousands on feng shui ornaments for your house (feng meaning "sense," and shui meaning "more money than"), or try that expensive form of Chinese therapy where needles are stuck into your arm and you feel great (I think it's called heroin). Or, if you prefer impoverishment with a nautical flavour, why not become the owner of a yacht, a ridiculous experience that's not unlike standing beneath a cold shower, tearing up £50 notes as rapidly as possible?

Messing about on the river has always been the preserve of the well-heeled, and that certainly seemed true of the competitors in yesterday's 149th University Boat Race (BBC1). In theory, rowing should be an inexpensive and egalitarian hobby, but the designer boats used in this annual Oxford v Cambridge affair cost a small fortune, as did the private education of most of the participants, hence the commentator's frequent references to "the Eton scholar" and "the Radley schoolboy".

That is hardly surprising because the race harks back to an era when lesser universities turned out engineers and scientists, while Oxbridge turned out gentlemen, and we plebs dutifully assembled along the banks of the Thames each springtime to catch a glimpse of the fine young things who would soon be ruling over us. How different from my own humble university's rowing club, where we hired our boats from the local park keeper, and my team was disqualified after a couple of wayward oars hit us squarely in the rollocks, got stuck in our hawseholes, put us off our stroke and made our cox droop.

The decision to hold the race on a Sunday (to avoid clashing with the Grand National) was a questionable one because what we saw was 17 minutes of racing crammed into two hours of televised coverage. Consequently, the presenters spent much of their time reciting increasingly ludicrous statistics ("the tallest ever crew was Cambridge with an average height of 6ft 6in in 1999" being the most surreal), or bringing us "live coverage" of the toss (performed with an 1829 sovereign), then admitting that winning it confers no tactical advantage whatsoever.

A very short grey man with BBC written on his jacket uttered talk so small that it surely contravened European regulations on dullardism, after which Peter Snow introduced footage of famous sinkings, including Cambridge in 1912, "a terrible year for sinking, the year when the Titanic went down". Everyone expressed hopes that nothing so terrible would happen this year, but of course they were all secretly wishing it might, and I wouldn't be surprised if somebody towed an iceberg up to Putney Bridge one year in a desperate attempt to liven up this otherwise predictable event.

By the time Tony Hawks appeared and began a tour of pubs that were quite near the river, I was rapidly losing the will to live. The vulgar sub-Gladiators music didn't help either, and after hearing that "the heavier crew nearly always wins" and that "Cambridge are a stone a man heavier than Oxford", the event itself seemed a mere formality. But no, because for once the race wasn't all over in the first five minutes, as each team took the lead, then fell behind, then surged forward again before crossing the finishing line together, with just inches between them. After a moment's delay, Oxford were declared the winners and dejected Cambridge fans had to face the unpalatable fact that their team's extra stone wasn't all muscle. A lot of it was Hagen-Dazs.

Like the Last Night of the Proms and the Queen's Christmas message, the University Boat Race lingers on in the nation's affection, not because of any great interest in the outcome, but because there's something gently reassuring about its very existence. However, despite the gentlemanly amateur status of the competitors, the "Aberdeen Asset Management" logos on their tracksuits underlined that this was a fiscal (as well as a physical) event, as did Hawks when he revealed that "90 per cent of the rowers in the first Boat Race went into the Church, but in recent times 90 per cent have gone into banking, so it's official: money is the new God". And as I thought of boats and money and snobbery, I suddenly remembered Lady Docker, who used to say that the reason she spent so much time on her yacht in the Med was because the azure sea reminded her of the blue eyes of some coal miners she'd once met. Lady Docker and her hubby, you may recall, tried to run a car company, but drank too much of the company's champagne, lost all their money and ended up like their vehicles (piston broke). Proof positive that there's one thing that money can't buy. Poverty.