Jonathan Garratt

All good things come to an end. Thankfully, so too do all bad things and everything that is in between – things that are good some weeks and not so good the next.

It’s easy to forget, when you have four taps and a water closet in every bathroom (and frequently more than one bathroom plus a kitchen in every house), just how important it used to be to have a well.

So hectic were the plot lines in the recently released Downton Abbey movie, I wondered whether the makers had taken the script for an eight-week series and thought, “The public are getting a bit bored with all this, why don’t we get it over in a couple of hours.”

I AM nothing if not a traditionalist, so when the former top jockey Ruby Walsh suggested that horseracing should change its race times from five-minute intervals to eight-minute intervals, I allowed myself three minutes of private outrage - until I realised just how much more productively I could have spent that time.

In the old days, I used to go to parties where we played pass-the-parcel; everyone won a prize.

There was racing at Worcester on Thursday and a coach-load of annual members from Kelso Racecourse in attendance.

We live in tense times and I’ve been warned that I must be careful about my language. No febrile talk of crushing the French or vanquishing the Europeans – no matter how much we want to see Enable record a fabulous third win in the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe at Longchamp tomorrow

It’s a tough job, but someone has to do it: on Wednesday it was racing at Kelso, Thursday a trip to the local brewery…

Civilisation, it has been said, came about as a result of over-productive farmers.

I LOVE deadlines. I like the whooshing noise that they make as they fly by.