Sky like the inside of a saucepan and a mean little drizzle stinging your face, garden sunk deep in midwinter gloom, except for the winter-flowering cherry trees with small, sugar-pink blossoms prinking from bare branches to lift the heart. I look for the first snowdrop, then the first aconite, then crocus, but forget about these cherries. The slender twigs last for weeks in a cool room. We have planted 1,000 snowdrop bulbs every autumn since coming to this North Cotswold farmhouse 15 years ago, and now there are great drifts of them. I always pick the first one I find and sniff. It smells very faintly of honey.
Talking of punting, which I like to do, the 2006 Cheltenham Gold Cup looks like being a poor affair, with Best Mate dead and the best of the rest out following injuries. This is the Great Race, never mind all those smart Guineas and Arcs for the carriage folk, but if they can’t produce better than the bunch of handicappers lined up for this year, it will be less significant than the ordinary fare at Towcester on a wet Wednesday. I started my betting career as a child, when it was illegal and my grandfather regularly put some of my pocket money on the Grand National, continued it with visits to a small bookie’s on the corner, full of smoke and plumbers taking the afternoon off, the air crackling with the noise from the Tannoy — no television screens and SIS then — and the shouts of ‘Come on, my son.’ I put a borrowed £2 on Red Rum and shocked my new husband by betting £5 on L’Escargot. Both won. So did Desert Orchid, and although I do not especially long for grandchildren, I cannot wait to tell them the story of how ‘I was there’ for his last great Gold Cup win, when the roar that greeted him was like the sound of the sky falling in.
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