Father Christmas knows who’s naughty and who’s nice.

Fortunately, when he attends the Festive Family Raceday at Kelso Racecourse on Sunday he won’t need to waste any time referring to his list – because we only let nice people in.

Following last week’s exciting announcement, about the resurrection of the Tote’s ten to follow competition, it seems that all of the Border Post’s readers have decided to write in at once. I’ve been inundated with messages and fortunately both of you wanted to know the same thing:

If this blog hath offended,
Think but this and all is mended:
That you have but slumber’d here
While these visions did appear.

You know that you’ve been invited to a night to remember when, before you’ve even got there, the host sends you a sachet of Alka-Seltzer and a 5cl bottle of whisky for the morning after.

That was Thursday’s 10th annual RCA Showcase Awards Night, staged at Hamilton Park.

It’s easy to forget, when you have four taps and a water closet in every bathroom (and frequently more than one bathroom plus a kitchen in every house), just how important it used to be to have a well.

The life-giving properties of a stable water-source enabled communities to develop and grow, giving rise to place names like Camberwell, Southwell and Fontwell…

So hectic were the plot lines in the recently released Downton Abbey movie, I wondered whether the makers had taken the script for an eight-week series and thought, “The public are getting a bit bored with all this, why don’t we get it over in a couple of hours.”

Maybe they did, because if there’s a trend in the world of entertainment at the moment it’s a drive towards shorter formats…

I am nothing if not a traditionalist, so when the former top jockey Ruby Walsh suggested that horseracing should change its race times from five-minute intervals to eight-minute intervals, I allowed myself three minutes of private outrage – until I realised just how much more productively I could be spending my time…

Many years ago I used to go to parties where we played pass-the-parcel; everyone won a prize. Now I go to dinner and it’s followed by a game of pass-the-blood-pressure-monitor where no one wins a prize but we all learn whether we were supposed to eat that last portion of profiteroles with extra cream.

There was racing at Worcester on Thursday and a coach-load of annual members from Kelso Racecourse in attendance. The last time so many Scots gathered on Pitchcroft they were part of King Charles II’s royalist army, there to fight the final battle of the English civil war…

We live in tense times and I’ve been warned that I must be careful about my language. No febrile talk of crushing the French or vanquishing the Europeans – no matter how much we want to see Enable record a fabulous third win in the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe at Longchamp on Sunday…