When, back in the mists of history, I proposed to Mrs Oakley (in the rather naff Caribbean cocktail bar of what seemed at the time to be a fashionable London venue patronised by a set we could not afford to join) I prefaced my question with a long preview about the perils of marrying a journalist. Fortunately, she did not take me seriously.
A young CNN producer told me the other day that she was warned on starting her journalism course in a Spanish university that the failure rate for marriages in our trade was worse than any other. But Mrs O has stuck with it through a train-wreck life of cancelled dinner parties, curtailed holidays and mortally offended ex-friends with more predictable occupations.
My Christmas reading has consoled me that she could have done worse. She could have married a jump jockey.
In public there have been few more amiable, intelligent and good-tempered National Hunt riders in the past 20 years than Mick Fitzgerald, for so long the stable jockey to Nicky Henderson in Lambourn.
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