It may be a young man's game but there's still inspiration for us dinosaurs

It's a young man's game, they say, and the 'it' is pretty universal. There are very few games you might describe as being old man's games; cribbage maybe, although it wouldn't surprise me to hear somebody had come up with a radical reworking of cribbage, TurboCrib maybe, played online by young people, without the need for matchsticks or a little wooden scoreboard, and with 'one for his nob' outlawed as a gender-specific micro-aggression.

Everywhere I look in racing I see more and more young people driving the dinosaurs to the brink of extinction like a new ice age of youth. I find it alarming not just to see the likes of Thady Gosden and Charlie Johnston appearing at the helm of top stables but to hear titans like John Gosden and Mark Johnston so much as mentioning the 'r' word – that's retirement, not rheumatism – when asked about the future (Johnston is only a couple of years older than me, for pity's sake, which may soon render my position at the Post untenable).

So, as the benefits of seniority (early vaccination, a bus pass and that's about it) become outweighed by the indignities (it's the colonoscopy camera that brings it home to you), it becomes heartening to see people of a certain age still cutting the mustard – and what a vintage month it's been.