'Why did I have £150 on a 150-1 shot? I'd lost the plot - or so I thought!'

How long could you keep your sense of humour?

Former championship-winning farrier Stevie Fisher has been totally and permanently incapacitated with locked-in syndrome since August 2014 yet has never let self-pity block out the remembered fun.

He wrote his autobiography, Blinkin' Ell, with an eye-gaze: 33,000 words blink by blink, letter by letter, to record the best and worst of an amazing life. It is a raw, boisterous, untutored, unghosted scrapbook of memories from a man whose world seemed to have ended when a massive stroke left him with only his left eyelid for communication. It tells of how, once he found his niche as a farrier, he burned the candle at both ends, in the saddle, at the races, or at many another jape on his countryman's horizon.