The turf | 8 December 2016

It is a long time since I spent a morning on the gallops with the footballer-turned-racehorse trainer Mick Channon (he was in Lambourn at the time), but it proved an education for me and for two inappropriately dressed young owner’s daughters who also turned up. Their vocabularies were extended considerably. National Treasure though he became, as one of our great footballers, Mick Channon the trainer is expletive-driven and easily angered to a Basil Fawlty level, which is disheartening for the jockeys and apprentices he often fires at roughly fortnightly intervals, who are still there the next week. His default mood is somewhere on the downside of grumpy.

In the best racing book of the year his son and assistant Mick Channon junior, who not surprisingly named one of his own horses Needless Shouting, admits that in his father’s world a conversation is an invitation to agree with him or have a barney. As far as Channon senior is concerned, ‘Delegation is what happened to Burnley last season.’ Mick junior concludes: ‘Only a successful footballer or a racehorse trainer could get away with it.’

The son has to cope daily with a father who could win the Nobel Prize for bollockings in a canter, but fortunately his sense of humour enables him to cope. He relates how, on one occasion, Mick senior kicked angrily at a traffic cone a wayward two-year-old had dislodged and inflamed his arthritis: it was filled with sand. On another, enraged by the price offered by a bloodstock agent’s pricing of a horse, he declares: ‘In future we’ll fly our own canoe.’ Mick junior decides on the spot to name another horse The Flying Canoe.

Writing How’s Your Dad? (Racing Post, £20) — which is centred around a car crash that killed an owner and nearly killed his father, and around Mick senior’s operation for a carcinoid — has clearly been cathartic.