I don't have the answers - and such is this mess I don't even know the questions

I've been following racing for 51 years now, although I accept that in 1970 I was more interested in Nijinsky, Lester Piggott and the Derby than I was in the flawed governance of the sport in Britain. Little did I know then that the problems engendered by inadequate funding, sketchy financial strategy and the human tendency toward self-interest and dissatisfaction would still be rumbling on five decades later.

Back then, of course, the world was a simpler place. The Jockey Club was in charge so we portrayed them as a bunch of chinless, port-swilling toffs and laid all of the blame at their door. Then we got rid of the Jockey Club and made some faltering steps towards democracy, in the expectation that everything would be all right. Only it wasn't. It got worse.

If you trawl back through the racing archives, you'll find any number of stories that, with a few names removed and cultural detail redacted, could have been written at any stage of the current millennium and a fair chunk of the previous one. The Suez crisis may have been raging in 1956, but racing was still in turmoil, I'm pretty sure.