I moved on.

‘Useless jockey, flogged my horse half to death just to get a third place.’ A large duffel-coated trainer, Andrew Woodward, was in full flow in front of a small group. ‘Damn idiot got himself banned for four days. I’ll give him excessive use of the whip on his bloody arse if he does that again.’

His fan club chuckled appreciatively but I believed him. Having once found his teenage daughter canoodling with an apprentice jockey in the feed store, he had held the hapless young man down over a hay bale and thrashed his bare buttocks raw with a riding whip. Some accounts say his daughter got the same treatment. It had cost Woodward a conviction for assault but it had won him respect.

He was a very good trainer but he had a well-deserved reputation as a hater of all jockeys. Some said that it was simple jealousy; he had always been too heavy to be a jockey himself. I had ridden for him a few times and more than once had received the lash of his tongue when results did not pan out as expected. He was not on my Christmas card list.

I drifted over nearer to the steps down to the parade ring where I had spotted someone that I did want to talk to.

‘Sid, my old mucker!’ Paddy O’Fitch was a fellow ex-jockey, shorter than I by an inch or two but a walking encyclopaedia on racing, especially steeplechasing. He spoke with a coarse Belfast accent and revelled in all things Irish, but the truth was that he had been born in Liverpool and christened Harold after the prime minister of the day. The surname on his passport was just Fitch. He had added the O’ while at school. He had apparently never forgiven his parents for emigrating across the Irish Sea to England just two weeks before his birth.

‘Hello, Paddy,’ I said, smiling.