Place your bets

I was given a new take on diplomacy the other day in what you might call the reflective postcoital stage of an interview with a foreign minister from eastern Europe. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘diplomats are really like ladies of easy virtue. Most of our best work is done late at night or at weekends, and we don’t get to choose our partners.’

In racing, too, information does not always come down the conventional route. One of the best tips I ever had came by way of an apology from an owner’s girlfriend who had accidentally poured most of a glass of red wine down my shirt front at Uttoxeter. The only racing day I have lost my shirt and come home a couple of hundred to the good. If she has access to a regular supply of 10–1 winners, I am prepared to let her make a habit of it.

Curious, though, how much attention we sometimes pay to a so-called tip just because it comes from a ferrety-faced stable lad or the guy who delivers the papers to a well-known breeder.

Under the ultimate pressure at Kempton on Boxing Day, accompanied by my son and his father-in-law and expected to deliver winners, I searched anxiously for dependable sources of information. The only one I could find was more interested in recycling Christmas cracker jokes and, while I thought that ‘What lies on the seabed and shivers?…A nervous wreck’ rather better than the average, it was little help in finding the winner of the novice hurdle. Fortunately, a casual acquaintance in the lift came to my rescue with a whisper for Brendan Powell’s in the first at Wincanton. I got 3–1 and Owlesbury Dream won nicely at 9–4.

The party claimed I was too late with that for them to get on.