It's autumn and time for a racing fan's thoughts to turn to the winter game

It's Towcester, so it must be winter – at least in the version of the calendar that's neither Roman nor Gregorian. This is the Racing Calendar, the work of reference that demarcates the seasons as they apply to men and horses, rather than to summer holidays and spring cleaning, and today, by folk tradition if not officially, is a fresh start in a year now characterised by starts.

The all-weather season – that nether world of face masks and sparse attendances – finished at the start of spring, ushering in the start of the Flat Turf season, which ends next weekend at Ascot (unless you happen to have a TV set and a world view that extends beyond Dogger Bank), to be followed seamlessly by the start of the short bit of the Flat season that doesn't count on the grass, and then the start of the longer bit that doesn't count on the all-weather, again.

It's a nebulous, ever-shifting landscape, but the one thing we can count on is that the summer jumps season, starting a nanosecond after the jumps season, will eventually, inexorably be overtaken by the start of what we racing folk call 'the jumps season proper'.