Newbury

Laikipia, Kenya Twenty years ago, we pitched a tent in the wilderness which became the farm where we live now. We were starting from scratch. At twilight we saw a low, silver mist descend into the trees, making halos around the distant giraffe and elephant, and settling into the grass. The constellations came out, the moon in its phases, with meteorite showers. There were no electric lights, nor any sounds outside camp apart from wild creatures. In our early days, drought made the land bare and silent. Dust devils coiled across the plains. One night, we woke to hear an army beating spears against shields. The breeze brought the first

‘God it’s hot,’ said a Newbury waitress escaping into the lift from rain-soaked crowds jostling in the bars last Saturday. ‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘It’s steaming.’ ‘Oh no,’ she replied. ‘That’s just the ladies waiting for Tom Jones,’ and the veteran Welsh warbler was indeed scheduled to be the after-racing entertainment. The race is framed to give some comparatively cheaper horsesthe chance of a good payday People go racing for different reasons and for punters one significant clue on Weatherby’s Super Sprint Day was the presence of trainer William Haggas. An invariably courteous interviewee when he is on the premises, the Newmarket maestro is by his own admission not one of