Don’t make me tile the sea

Sadly the racing season both for pure-bred Arabians and even for camels was over when I was in Qatar last weekend. But I did discover that Arab mums, like British trainers, tend to wear rose-tinted spectacles. ‘To an Arab mother,’ the Gulf saying goes, ‘every donkey is a gazelle.’ I do rather like, too, the way angry Arabs don’t tell someone to ‘go and jump in the lake’ but to ‘go and tile the sea’.

I can only hope, after the traumas of seconditis that we suffered with our winter Twelve To Follow, that I don’t get too many end-of-season invitations to go aquatic tiling. And hope was resurrected over jumps. Attentive readers might recall that I offered John Quinn’s Leslingtaylor as a substitute for the injured in my Twelve. The other day he won the first big hurdle race of the new season at 16–1. Stick with him.

Let us start the summer ball rolling with Supersonic Dave, a three-year-old trained at Manton by Brian Meehan, who won more money abroad last year than any other British trainer.