'We don't know if Kameko stays - but I'd rather find out in the Derby than not'

The evenly spread gravel on the driveway is baking in 36 degrees of unrelenting heat and the bright red Ferrari looks as though it could use a spot in the shade to cool down. In the living room of the grand Newmarket house, Sheikh Fahad Al Thani, dressed down in navy t-shirt, blue jeans and white trainers (none of them, one suspects, acquired by queuing for two hours at the grand reopening of TK Maxx), is watching the 3.30 from Naas on a very big screen and keeping strategically out of the sun.

One thing he can't avoid, though, is the inevitable question that is trotted out almost immediately, as a natural extension to the genetically programmed British obsession with the weather: "You must be used to this kind of heat, aren't you?"

A note of comic exasperation creeps into his voice as he fields an inquiry he has plainly heard several times a day since the heatwave began: "Everybody keeps saying that, but back in Qatar everything is air-conditioned, everywhere you go. The house is air-conditioned, the car is air-conditioned, the shops are air-conditioned, so in the summer you rarely go outside. Here, there's no air-conditioning, so it's hot even indoors, but it's a lovely day so you can't complain."