'I thought I’d die in Bolivia after helping push a car at high altitude'

You have to identify your strengths and make them count. Going back to my brief flirtation with the theatre, I had no great desire to play Hamlet or King Lear but my performance as a seedy nightclub owner was much admired. Be in no doubt, I can do seedy.

These past two Mondays I might have become a gambler again. Unless he was tired after a long hard season (and if we start worrying about that we might as well take up basket weaving), there was simply no way Ballesteros could lose a Windsor claimer. Then Dance The Dream, an autumn filly if ever there was one and still fresh as a daisy after a light campaign, was available at 11-4 in a mile-and-a-half handicap at Leicester, where one or two of them had as much chance of staying the trip as I have of becoming the next Poet Laureate.

Now comes the tricky bit, where I admit I fancied these horses far more than anything likely to take my eye between now and the far side of the Aintree Grand National. Stan Mellor once said that if people knew everything that went on in a three-mile steeplechase, they wouldn’t bet. He was wrong, of course, but I understood what he meant.