God, I love the jumps - as Cobden's fighting talk, Hendo's hospitality and Cheltenham's return have reminded me

I've been evangelising about racing for more than half a century – and it hasn't always been easy, as I'm sure you know – but autumn is always the time of year that tests my resolve, stretching my powers of resilient loyalty to a hole-ridden, almost transparent state, like the worst pastry ever seen on Bake Off.

The rain turns the end of the Flat season into a punting minefield so that, where once I had the game worked out, the days instead seem to be full of maidens in the mud restricted to horses who have never seen mud before, or handicaps that are won by 25 lengths by horses who hadn't raised a gallop since last Pancake Tuesday. The evenings, meanwhile, are stuffed with reluctant form study that will inevitably turn out to be pointless, due to more heavy rain, abandonments and Class 6s on the all-weather.

It also takes time to regain my jumping mojo, summer jumping having deadened me to the charms of the sport while the form book (or its digital equivalent) reads a bit like Proust in Swahili until things really get going properly. But there’s always a turning point – generally in the form of a decent bet, and something more exciting than a 4-6 shot in a novice hurdle. Something with a bit of meat on the bone.