Sometimes it's best to take Kipling's advice and sit still

You can learn a lot from Rudyard Kipling. His tales of how the leopard got his spots and how the camel got his hump are well known, but he’s also an authority on subjects as diverse as espionage techniques on the North-West Frontier, troubling racial epithets and the art of race-riding.

In The Broken-Link Handicap Kipling tells the story of a racehorse named Shackles who had his own ideas about the game. A trainer manages to crack Shackles’s idiosyncratic code by teaching his young rider “the hardest thing a jockey can learn – to sit still, to sit still, and to keep on sitting still”.

It’s sound advice for punters too. There’s always the urge to be doing something: over-trading an in-play event, needlessly hedging a shrewd ante-post bet or chucking away a few quid on the race before your nap of the day runs.