Don’t get me wrong, I love the Cheltenham Festival: the very best horses, fantastic facilities, electric atmosphere, beautiful setting, scintillating competition, etc, etc.

It is, without doubt, the best event in the entire calendar – like Christmas and all my birthdays rolled into one, only with more guests. Nobody looks forward to the Cheltenham Festival each year more than me but, never mind extending the meeting to five days, isn’t it time we thought about staging it somewhere a bit further north?

There is something to be said for the Perspex screens that retail workers stand behind, although they’re not very practical if one is moving around – so I’m beginning to think that laboratory-style glasses would be a great idea for crowded spaces.

I can imagine them selling well in the car park at Cheltenham next week: “Lucky heather mister? Cross my palm with silver and I’ll tell your fortune darlin’… and if you make it one of those nice crisp polymer notes, I’ll throw in a pair of goggles…”

The phones are ringing off their hooks with people trying to book tickets (which is marvellous) and I think that the ITV rigging team might be building a new racecourse (which is even more marvellous); I just hope they finish before tomorrow and that they leave some of it standing when they leave on Sunday…

Some changes are more welcome than others. This week we’ve witnessed the transformation from Winter to Spring in the Scottish Borders, the end of restrictive Covid regulations in England (but not yet in Scotland) and the first land war for more than seventy-six years in Europe…

There’s no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong type of racing.

Today, with Storm Eunice approaching, we thought we might take the first steps at Kelso towards the ‘White Turf’ racing model that’s been pioneered in St Moritz since 1907. There, in the Swiss resort on the southern slopes of the Alps, an innovative Clerk of the Course decided it might be a bright idea to lay out a track on the snowy surface of the lake…

We like to talk about the romance of the turf: a sport woven from fanciful dreams that, for many in the Northern Hemisphere, start each year on 14th February. Because Valentine’s Day is the first day of the Thoroughbred mating season, the optimum time to coordinate a meeting between a mare and stallion if you want to breed a foal soon after 1st January – the official birthday of all Thoroughbreds.

So far this season we’ve welcomed 471 horses to Kelso Racecourse. That’s 1,884 hooves, most of them circumnavigating the track at least twice – so roughly 3,768 hoof prints every five metres or so, which equates to something over 1.5 million hoof-shaped divots on the track.

Life after lockdown has become so damn difficult. One week we’re being told which parties we can attend, when we’re permitted to have a drink and when we’re obliged to sit down. Now it’s all decisions, decisions, decisions.

Sometimes I just wish the Government would get more involved in my life and tell me what to do…

The First Minister has spoken and, as the late singer Meat Loaf might have said, “Anything is Permitted”.

Except of course that’s not exactly true – shoplifting is still heavily frowned upon, as is armed robbery, drug dealing, and driving at more than 20 miles-per-hour through any of the towns or villages of the Scottish Borders…

Who would be so duplicitous as to make up a set of rules that they aren’t willing to abide by themselves?

Except maybe parents who won’t allow their children to eat chocolate, drink alcohol or go to bed late. Or teachers who won’t allow pupils to vape and smoke. Or politicians who would prefer us not to have get-togethers after work, drinks and nibbles when someone could be having a funeral, or sexual relations with someone from another household…