If you haven’t yet been out to buy your lemons, here’s a timely reminder that Shrove Tuesday falls next week. Pancake Day is the day before Ash Wednesday – the first day of Lent, when many Christians undertake a period of fasting and abstinence in preparation for Easter.

It would clearly be a poor time to give up going horseracing, given that Kelso’s Morebattle Hurdle takes place on the following day, Thursday 15th February, and the Cheltenham Festival falls midway through the Lenten period on 13th – 16th March. I’d therefore just about made up my mind to abstain from watching winter sports and listening to the Spice Girls – but all that seems to have gone out of the window.

When I read that Michael O’Leary had called for a Ryanair-style hurdle race at the Cheltenham Festival, I thought perhaps he was proposing a race where half the horses couldn’t run because there weren’t enough pilots.

But it turned out that I’d got the wrong end of the stick. It was much, much, worse.

A cross-border disparity could arise between students in England and Scotland following the announcement that English pupils will not participate in a new international test designed to assess respect for other cultures, challenge extremism and help to identify fake news.

The tests have been devised as part of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) to measure tolerance, cultural awareness and how well teenagers can distinguish between reliable sources of information and fake news. Rumour has it that, in order to minimise the impact on horseracing, the British Horseracing Education and Standards Trust (BHEST) is developing a test of its own, to ensure that racegoers are equipped to handle differences in culture as they explore the varied delights presented by racecourses throughout the British Isles.

In horseracing, ups can occasionally be followed by additional ups, but are more commonly followed by downs. It was therefore almost inevitable that Sunday’s scintillating sport at Kelso, packed full of air-punchingly close finishes, would be followed by a gloomy and depressing Monday.

In fact this Monday was so gloomy that it even had a depressing name: Blue Monday. It’s something to do with the quotient of gloominess, calculated by adding together all the good things in life and then dividing them by the multiple of all the rubbish things about January – like being in debt, having used all your holiday and polished off all the remaining chocolate and alcohol that was so plentiful at Christmas.

Anthea Morshead, Clerk of the Course at Kelso and Cartmel, has just returned from Australia where she reported that three race-days had been abandoned during her stay, as a result of too much sunshine and hard ground. Which strikes me as a considerably higher-class problem than losing race-meetings as a result of too much frost and hard ground.

But I’m not envious. The days are already becoming appreciably longer and our optimism has soared in tandem with the Vitamin D that is now coursing through our veins.

Competition being fierce at Christmas, I was forced during a family game of trivia, to lodge an objection to the winner. Since when has vanilla been Britain’s favourite flavour of ice-cream?

The biggest selling flavour maybe… by dint of the fact that vanilla is the blandest and least likely to cause offence. But favourite? No way! A true poll would surely have demonstrated that chocolate is the most popular flavour with the wider public, while the more discerning among us would probably opt for mint-choc-chip. But that wasn’t the answer on the card, so my objection was thrown out by the Stewards who have been tremendously busy over the Christmas holidays.

The abandonment of racing at Kelso this week means that we’ll never know the result of the fourth race on the programme, The ‘Blessed Are The Cheesemakers’ Handicap Steeplechase. The title, taken from Monty Python’s Life of Brian, prompts the inevitable question: What did the Romans ever do for us?

Whatever you think the answer might be, they didn’t install an underground-heating system at Kelso Racecourse – as evidenced by the loss of Friday’s festive fixture due to frost. But they could have done…

I’d like to thank the correspondent that e-mailed, following my appearance at a BHA disciplinary hearing last week, offering the Kelso fence attendants some brand new high-vis fork covers for Christmas.

The team here were left with faces as red as Santa’s trousers when a fork, used for repairing the track between races, was accidently left leaning in front of the second fence during the first circuit of the steeplechase won by As De Mee in October. It was an awkward moment and we were all relieved that there were no serious consequences – that is, if you don’t count appearing before the BHA’s disciplinary committee as being serious.

North, South, East or West. We, like to think that the points of the compass are definitive, placing us in a distinct location. But it’s all relative – Kelso is south of Musselburgh, Cartmel is north of York and Ayr is west of Newton Abbot.

Comparisons between racecourses are relative too – so any racecourse which offers National Hunt racing is generally better than one that offers only Flat racing (obviously). A racecourse which offers Champagne at a reasonable price, is better than one that operates at a multiple of three-times the ordinary retail value. And a track which has a sweetie stand selling red liquorice is much better than one that has no sweetie stand at all.

I may occasionally have worried about the rain, but I never suffered from Chionophobia whilst managing race-meetings at Cartmel .

A rare condition, more prevalent among Clerks and Managers of winter jumps tracks, Chionophobia is the fear of snow – usually the prospect of getting buried beneath it, although the term can also be stretched to include the fear of racecourses getting blanketed in the white stuff.