Much missed

We had been through so much together. Racing not just on the domestic scene but also in Melbourne, Mauritius and Maisons-Lafitte. Together over 15 years we had been bird-watching in Venezuela, Costa Rica and the Gambia, Madagascar and the Isle of Mull. But at Newmarket last Saturday somebody relieved me of my long-cherished Zeiss binoculars. Bombed out perhaps by too many 18-hour days lately in the television job, I either left them on the roof of the car as I retrieved an umbrella from the boot or I put them down when writing out a bet. Either way, somebody chose to help themselves.

One should not become attached to inanimate objects but somehow I grieve for those bins as well as nursing a sense of grievance at a dishonest world. A low-key wet Saturday at Newmarket somehow seemed the wrong setting to have said goodbye to what had become old friends.

It just wasn’t my week. A few days earlier I had been expertly relieved of my wallet by an Oxford Circus pickpocket. Losing the entire wallet made a change, said Mrs Oakley, from voluntarily handing its contents to a row of gentlemen with loud voices laying the odds at Kempton, Sandown and Lingfield Park. But what really rankled was that the wallet’s contents included two winning Tote tickets I had been keeping to send to the Late Pay office. That really did hurt.

They say that trouble comes in threes, and the third disaster was not long arriving. I had driven to Newmarket largely in order to watch Major Cadeaux, one of this column’s Twelve to Follow, in the Group Three Cheveley Park Stud Criterion Stakes. There are horses you back because somebody else gives you the whisper.