Royal Ascot-winning trainer a traditionalist with no desire to live in the past

It's not a notebook or a dictaphone you need with Henry Candy, it's a blindfold and a last cigarette. He walks into the garden as though the firing squad were waiting patiently there, head high, back straight, a small smile playing on his lips, wondering idly about the possibility of a last-minute reprieve.

"I'm not very good at this sort of thing," he says in a quiet voice almost drowned out by birdsong. He gazes around, ascertaining his position within a particularly delightful section of English countryside, the rolling green hills, the trees swaying gently in the breeze, the bee-loud glade. Heavenly, really; all right then, he seems to conclude, a temporary hour of purgatory can be withstood.

"I just find it hard to believe that anybody could be remotely interested in me. Perhaps they're interested in Twilight Son and Limato," he says, wryly, and of course we are with the July Cup on the horizon, and we'll get to them, but there's a fascination with Candy too. He has been training racehorses at Kingston Warren, buried almost inaccessibly in the Lambourn hinterland, for 42 years, and his continued presence in the racecards, in the winner's enclosure, is a comforting reminder that the frantic imperatives of the modern world have not completely overwhelmed the gentler methods of an earlier era.