Absolute beginners

Heaven be praised for the sinner who repenteth, however long it takes. For President George Bush Senior, his occasional meetings with Margaret Thatcher were like visits to the dentist: an inevitable occasion but not one to be anticipated with pleasure. Mrs Oakley has long taken the same attitude to going racing: at one Sandown Park meeting she was spotted back in the car park with a novel. At Windsor last weekend, however, she turned to me and declared: ‘You know, when you get to see the horses properly I can understand the appeal.’

Two circumstances had assisted the breakthrough. One was that the horses we were watching in the parade ring were mostly mature four-, five- and six-year-olds contesting a Listed race, not a bunch of skittish raw-boned two-year-olds yet to fill out their frames. Well-muscled, powerful individuals, they loped around athletically with the controlled swagger that comes from racing experience. Clearly Mrs Oakley is coming to appreciate the more mature individual. As Gypsy Rose Lee once commented on the ageing process: ‘Honey, I’ve still got everything I used to have, it’s just that it’s all a little bit lower’ — although I bet she was no better than the rest of us getting up from a sunken car seat.

The other factor in Mrs Oakley’s mini-conversion was that we were in company with two sporting Swedish ladies, Gunilla and Anita, to whom we had promised a racecourse experience. Racing is a sociable sport best enjoyed in company and once Anita had recovered from her initial exposure to a typical British evening racing crowd — ‘Half of them look as though they have just got out of bed, the other half look as though they can’t wait to jump into bed with someone’ — the three enjoyed the experience together.