Few experiences in racing are as guaranteed to cheer you up as a visit to Oliver Sherwood’s lovely yard in Upper Lambourn. Trying vainly to match strides with Oliver back and forth across the Mandown schooling grounds on a frosty morning last week, as Leighton Aspell, Sam Jones and stable conditional Tom Garner polished the
My favourite racecourse-bar story this year involved a towel-clad jockey who had enjoyed his game of golf so much that in the shower room he demonstrated the iron shot that had gained him an eagle. Hearing a clunk behind him he discovered that his backswing had connected forcibly with a dwarf, who was lying prone.
Luminaries interviewed in the Racing Post are often asked to name four people they would most like to have dinner with. Lucky enough to enjoy a pub lunch last week with three who would certainly qualify for my dinner-table four — Henrietta Knight, Terry Biddlecombe and Mick Channon — I felt something of a fraud
After Brad Wiggins’s Tour de France victory, Mo Farah’s Olympics successes and Andy Murray’s first Grand Slam title, any other result would have been unthinkable, so praise the Lord that Frankel did win Ascot’s Champion Stakes. On unsuitably soft ground and after gifting the others lengths at the start, the unbeaten star of world racing
Remember the one about the husband who goes home and gets clouted with a frying pan by his wife. ‘Hey, what’s that for?’ ‘I found a note in your suit pocket with a number and the name Fanny May on it?’ ‘Oh, that’s just a horse I bet on last week.’ Two weeks later he
Arriving in Halifax, Nova Scotia the other night to join a cruise ship for after-dinner talks, I found I was sharing my hotel with 250 women, every one of them clad in eye-jarring combinations of red and purple. It was the annual ‘Hoot’ of the Red Hat Society, an association of ladies of 50-plus devoted,
Ronald Reagan once told his staff that they were always to wake him if there was an emergency ‘even if I am in a Cabinet meeting at the time’. All of us, Mrs Oakley included, have our definition of an emergency and the other night she shook me awake at 4 a.m. to confront one.
Sometimes it is all about how you look at things, as was made clear to a clean-living accountant who had helped old ladies across the road, given generously to charity and even found something nice to say about George Osborne. When he shuffled off the mortal coil he found himself sharing a heavenly cloud with
OK, OK, so taking part is what matters. But it is medals the viewers want out of the Olympics, lots of them, and for once there is the expectation there will be plenty, perhaps nearly 50, from our cyclists, swimmers, sailors, athletes and the rest. Since the Atlanta Games of 1996, when Britain returned, to
Cramming too much in is always a mistake. It was just one broken jar of tahini paste, requested by Italian friends along with the pork pie, the Marmite and two bottles of Amontillado as items unobtainable in Sardinia, but boy what damage it had done after my holiday suitcase spent three hours in the care
The Oxfordshire village to which Mrs Oakley and I have moved is possibly the friendliest place in the world. But even harmonious communities can have their little tensions. Last week we learnt of a local lady who was affronted by the number of dog poos deposited on her front lawn by a neighbour’s terrier. She
Royal trainer Richard Hannon, we learn from an intriguing new volume about the Queen’s lifetime love affair with horse-racing, is essentially a stockman. He recognises horses by their shape and mannerisms rather than by what their owners choose to call them. So the chestnut colt with three white socks is, in Hannon-speak, ‘the Galileo colt’.
When they present themselves there are certain experiences you simply have to undergo to make life complete, like rounding Cape Horn, watching the waters cascade over the Niagara Falls or flying on Concorde (although Mrs Oakley, I felt, rather overdid that last one when it was still possible by dancing that night with the captain
The fittest horse wins the Guineas, the luckiest horse wins the Derby and the best horse wins the St Leger, goes the old saying. But not since Nijinsky in 1970 has any horse won all three. Many of those best qualified, like Mill Reef, have not attempted the feat. Since Nijinsky failed to win the
After the 2011 Grand National, I sided with the reformers who wanted changes to the use of the whip by jockeys. If racing is to survive we need bums on seats and have to be responsive to public opinion. In the continuing furore after this year’s National, I find myself in a different camp because
Have the French got the balls to do it? After the triumph of Corine Barande-Barbe’s globe-trotting superstar Cirrus des Aigles in Dubai’s Sheema Classic on World Cup Night the debate has resumed: will they open up Europe’s most prestigious race, the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, to horses like Cirrus des Anges who are geldings
As political editor of the BBC I once had to appear on the Today programme just after the 7 a.m. news to discuss the passing of an MP who had tragically died experimenting with auto-eroticism. Two minutes before we went on air I was still engaged in a conference call with BBC executives anxious as
The first I heard of the recent death of Norman St John Stevas was from a questioner after I had delivered a lecture on Margaret Thatcher aboard a liner off the Chilean coast. What came immediately to mind was the story of Mrs T. dispatching one of their fellow Cabinet ministers to tell Norman that
After a lifetime reporting politics, I am as well accustomed to spin as a washing machine. But a rich new example reaches me from the US. Researching her family tree, a Californian discovered that she shared a great-great-uncle, Remus Reid, with a US senator. Unfortunately, the great-great-uncle was a regularly convicted horse thief and train
I was birdwatching the other day with a jolly Methodist minister who had only ever once been to a racecourse. Knowing nothing of the sport, in the first race he had backed an outsider called something like Holy Orders, purely on the name, and collected. He put most of his winnings on The Lord in