Many happy returns to the Corduroy Cavalier

On Monday, on the morning of his 50th birthday, Jamie Osborne should have woken up feeling sore all over. Every sinew from his neck down should have ached from a proposed ride with friends on Sunday morning to commemorate the big day. The subsequent long lunch would have done for his head.

It never came to pass. “There were a ridiculous amount of health and safety issues when I started planning it,” the Lambourn trainer says. “I wanted to do something I enjoy most in life, but it soon became too much hassle. I abandoned the idea and decided I would do absolutely nothing instead.”

The very idea that Osborne would baulk at trivial obstacles like health and safety suggests the big five-oh brings with it the onset of a mid-life crisis. He would never have given it a moment’s consideration in his riding days, when his buccaneering spirit caught the admiring eye of the late Queen Mother. Not for nothing was he known as the Corduroy Cavalier.