Charlie Hills: 'Everybody's hurting at the moment - owners and horses are hard to come by'

No matter how vehemently racehorse trainers try to explain to us that what they do involves a gruelling physical contortion of keeping shoulder to the wheel and nose to the grindstone, while simultaneously manning the pumps and balancing the books, the belief persists they spend most of their time being driven to the races in their Bentley to drink champagne with owners and watch horses win.

Charlie Hills is having none of it. "It's tough," he assures me. "It may not look like it on the top of the downs on a lovely morning, but there would be easier ways for my boys [James, 15, and Eddie, 12] to make a living if they were thinking about going down this route."

Then he decides that attack is the best form of defence. "Anyway, how hard can it be to write a couple of thousand words about somebody?" he asks entirely rhetorically. "I bet AI could do it a lot quicker."