A good read

Seeking to persuade Mrs Oakley to wager a bottle of Ledaig single malt on which of three wet sheep will be first up a windy escarpment tends to be as close as you get to racing when holidaying on the Isle of Mull. But one of the great blessings of the sport is its depth of anecdotage, and the three latest volumes kept me going for the week.

The preface to Leigh and Woodhouse’s Racing Lexicon (Faber, £9.99) mentions the racing enthusiasm of the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, which reminded me of the bishop who declined an invitation to say grace at the Gimcrack dinner ‘because I don’t really want to remind the Almighty that I am here’.

The Lexicon provides a guide to racing jargon and journalism. Under ‘Leg’, for example, the authors note that a horse may have ‘a touch of a leg’ (an injury to the limb).