Impossible not to have a soft spot for the horse next door

if you don’t have a soft spot for The Giant Bolster then your soft spots are in need of urgent attention.

Blessed with a memorably daft name, with colours you could somehow pick out in a pea-souper and trained by a man who spoke straight from the heart before sending his brain off in hot pursuit to check he’d not put his foot in it, The Giant Bolster wrote a much-loved tale that grew in the telling.

Part of his appeal was that he was the horse next door. His fizzingly enthusiastic owners, Simon Hunt and Gary Lambton, were not big-name high rollers, and David Bridgwater’s Wyck Hill yard just out of Stow-on-the-Wold was struggling before The Giant Bolster applied the defibrillator of fame on the place.