Horse racing

‘This is a two Voltarol day,’ I thought, as I popped another pill and settled into the bath after Darcy’s first hurdling session. Well, three Voltarol if you count the one I gave to the young jockey who parted company with his horse at the first hurdle just in front of me. He knelt on the ground wearing a stoical expression as he cradled his arm. He has been doing this since he was 15. When he is older he will be able to tell his children, in all seriousness, that he went to the school of hard knocks and the college of crashing into hurdles. ‘If there are bones

I was both delighted and unsurprised that Denis Healey made it to 98. One day in the 1970s I took him to lunch at L’Epicure. As he encouraged the waiter to pile his plate higher and higher from the hors-d’oeuvre trolley, my astonishment must have been plain because he grinned and declared: ‘Don’t worry about me — both my parents lived into their nineties.’ Another time, Mrs Oakley and I were in a dusty square in Collioure in south-west France when music began blaring from a loudspeaker to advertise a nearby circus. We looked up to see — along with toothless old ladies in black and pipe-smoking locals playing a

‘The last owner who tried to ride his own horse got tanked,’ said the trainer, looking up at me as I perched on Darcy, knees nearly up to my chest like a pixie in the racing saddle. ‘After three circuits he threw himself off into the muck heap.’ ‘I get the picture,’ I said, running my gloved hand against Darcy’s neck. ‘Please, look after your mother,’ I whispered to her. She was perfectly calm beneath me. Because I raised her, I have always felt like I can trust this horse with my life. I was about to find out exactly what that meant. It is all very well trusting a

One of Alan Bennett’s characters once lamented, ‘We tried to set up a small anarchist community …but people wouldn’t obey the rules.’ Perhaps he should have found a job within horse-racing. Just look at the aftermath to this year’s St Leger. I was at Bath Races that day when the authorities thoughtfully broadcast the Doncaster Classic on their big screen, and I am not writing without prejudice. Some near the Bath screen endured the undignified spectacle of a tan-trousered spectator, now well qualified for his bus pass, giving a passable imitation of a whirling dervish while shouting home Ralph Beckett’s filly Simple Verse as she flashed first past the post

The Indian summer was still fending off the mists and mellow fruitfulness. But the autumn term was about to begin; the season’s changes would soon be manifest. So it was a day for anecdote and recapitulation; for telling amusing August tales, behind which lurked deeper meanings. A couple of friends had been to the Palio, as everyone should, once. I remember being surprised that several hours of mediaeval pageantry could hold one’s attention, which it certainly did: but more than once? No one would watch Psycho twice. I also remember being surprised that the young of Siena would spend weeks rehearsing: hard to imagine that happening here. The spectacle ends

For all their formidable physical presence, racehorses spook easily. A sudden gust of wind flapping a plastic sack, a page from yesterday’s Racing Post blowing across the stable yard can provoke a fit of the twitches: eyes rolling, nostrils flaring and back legs snapping out a lethal kick. Trainers need a capacity for quiet reassurance and you don’t need long at Clive Cox’s Beechdown Farm in Lambourn to be struck by its overriding calm. His charges had pounded up watered gallops dried by a breeze like a hairdryer and as Clive hosed down their sleek coats afterwards, he declared, sponge in hand, ‘This is the best part of the day,

A stint in dry dock — the ‘dry’ literally — has one advantage. There is time for lots of long reading. After many decades since the last opening of Middlemarch, I had forgotten how good it is. I had completely forgotten a delicious minor character, Mrs Cadwallader, who is a blend of Aunt Dahlia and Lady Circumference. A Marxist heedless of his safety might describe her as declining gentry. She would have rejected both words with scorn. In those days, many Church of England livings were bestowed on parsons such as Mr Cadwallader, who needed the money to preserve their social status. ‘The C of E was always better at