He is hot on white-water rafting.

The clerk vanished, to be replaced a minute later by a tubby Indian with exhausted, visionary eyes.

It was a letter of thanks which he requested should thus be entabled and hung up in all the churches and chapels of Cornwall “in everlasting remembrance of a people's faithfulness and a sovereign's gratitude.”

“Jockeys are bad tipsters. But that one was a cert, a dead cert.” A dead cert. The casual, everyday racing expression jabbed in my mind like a needle.