I am sorry but if anybody else asks, ‘Did you have a good Christmas?’ they are in danger of me dotting them one. I arrived back with Mrs O. from two weeks lecturing abroad to discover that the neighbour to whom we had lent one house key could not find it. The builder holding the other hadn’t received our text asking him to hide it in a secret place. After two hours in a café there was no option but to burgle my own home through an upstairs window. It then took an hour’s negotiation to get the security firm to help me switch off the alarm deafening our neighbours while they insisted on me giving them a code number they had never supplied.
Mrs Oakley, a whirling dervish in the kitchen when needs must, then had a day in which to turn round a fortnight’s washing and make a Christmas cake, Christmas pudding, 50 mince pies and the turkey stuffing before a ten-hour drive for a family Christmas with our daughter on the Isle of Mull. There, one look at our whey-faced son-in-law as he fought the door open against the gales confirmed the worst. The family had been struck by a pestilence to which I, too, succumbed on Christmas night.
We love them dearly but it didn’t stop raining for three days, there was no television for the Boxing Day racing and the drive back down the M6, punctuated by discomfort stops at a hefty proportion of the nation’s service stations, was a nightmare. Life was not improved by a phone call from my accountant en route warning that my tax bill was double what I had expected.
Mrs Oakley, coper extraordinaire, sailed through unscathed and polished her halo by sending me off to Newbury on New Year’s Eve despite having to prepare a celebration dinner. When that tax bill is paid, I will be looking for a good jeweller.
There is no better restorative than a cracking day’s racing. I arrived too late to back Andy Turnell’s Gotoyourplay, the 14–1 winner of the first but no matter. Andy needed the winner more than I did. He was unlucky enough to lose the promising Mountain Song in Newbury’s hideous electrocution incident. Lately his horses have been running well without winning races — three youngsters were placed the previous week in good company at Ascot — and when the economic blight is cutting your numbers fashion is everything. Hopefully a 14–1 Saturday winner will help one of Britain’s most realistic and friendly trainers turn the corner.
Philip Hobb’s Fingal Bay won again, though not at a price to aid the tax bill much, and Alan King’s Vendor impressed, too, in the juvenile hurdle. He had been comfortably slipstreaming the leader until a mistake at the last cost him momentum. Getting going again on the sticky ground wasn’t easy and he showed class in recovering to win. The same applied to Nicky Henderson’s All The Aces
We crowded to congratulate Richard Johnson on riding his 100th winner of the season, a feat he has now performed for a staggering 16 consecutive seasons. In any other era this ultimate professional would have won jockeys’ championships galore but because he rides simultaneously with the incredible Tony McCoy Johnson has still to win his first. The good-natured rider just smiled and promised, ‘I’ll keep trying. I’ll keep chasing,’ claiming to total disbelief, ‘I just steer them round.’
These modest jumping boys are true sportsmen. Another of the best is the quiet man who has come down from the north, Denis O’Regan. Howard Johnson’s forced withdrawal from the sport painfully lost Denis his stable jockey position after he had ridden Cheltenham Festival winners like the great Inglis Drever. Now based in the Cotswolds, he rides regularly for Victor Dartnall, Paul Webber, Tom Symonds and David O’Meara.
You won’t see a wiser, more patient ride than Denis gave Andy Turnell’s Gotoyourplay even if it did earn him a couple of days’ holiday when his mount wandered after the last. With 200 winners under his belt in Ireland (he rode for Francis Flood and Noel Meade), the softly spoken Irishman with the open face has plenty of experience, but has had to reinvent himself. More and more trainers are snapping him up for rides and the results speak for themselves with 35 victories this season.
Two of his regular employers, David O’Meara and Tom Symonds, are young men making a name for themselves and O’Regan has arrived at the right time, expanding his horizons thanks to his dependability and adaptability. It is not a word you hear often today but he means it when he calls himself a humble man: ‘I’m humble enough to ride anything. With Howard Johnson, I had three years of looking forward to big races at the weekends. Now I appreciate the midweek winners, too. I appreciate them all and if I keep on riding winners then maybe I’ll be getting back on some top-class horses, too. All I want is an injury-free season.’ Nobody deserves it more and with rides like Time For Rupert and Australia Day coming his way, I reckon Denis’s point is already proven.
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