More from life

British racing is such a quirky minefield that some were surprised when in 2011 the authorities chose Paul Bittar, a man from Wagga Wagga with most of his racecourse experience in New Zealand and the state of Victoria, to run the British Horseracing Authority. Australian cricketers, it used to be said, had a standard uniform: green caps and a chip on the shoulder. When I mentioned in front of a racing club audience the other night that New Zealanders will bet on anything that moves, and if it doesn’t move they will kick it and bet on when it will start to move, Paul was sufficiently Australian to chide: ‘You’re not suggesting, are you, that Australians would be any less eager to have a bet?’ It set the tone for an evening of good humour and candid common sense.

An email popped into my inbox on Tuesday morning urging me to join a ‘fair admissions campaign’ that’s been launched by a couple of mums in Shepherd’s Bush. Their children are at a local primary school and they’re angry that they won’t be able to get them into any of the local faith schools. ‘Two of our children are in Year Five and we feel offended by the fact that out of 11 secondary schools in the borough almost half will put them at the very bottom of the waiting list due to our “wrong” beliefs,’ they write. Now, I’m probably among the dozen or so local residents least likely to join this campaign but, to be fair, I don’t think they singled me out.

This year you don’t want to be a jockey’s valet. Never have their washing machines spun so vigorously. From every sortie, riders return as mud-spattered as if they had been trampled by a dozen rugby scrums, and so many of us gathered at the Abbey Road Studios to hear the weights to be carried in this year’s Grand National were praying that the elements will have relented well before the 5 April contest. The National is both jump racing’s biggest advertisement and its greatest potential disaster. In 1998, when the four-mile marathon was run in atrocious conditions, three horses died and only six of the 37 runners finished the course. In 2001, it was again a mudlarks’ benefit: only seven entrants survived the first circuit and only two completed without a fall.

Shirley Temple, who died last week at the age of 85, was the most successful child film star in history. During the second half of the 1930s, a decade in which she made 23 films and earned $3 million before puberty, she was America’s most popular film star of any kind; Clark Gable came only a distant second. What was the secret of her enormous popularity? According to Temple’s own oft-repeated explanation, ‘People in the Depression wanted something to cheer them up, and they fell in love with a dog, Rin Tin Tin, and a little girl.’ This surely has truth in it, for the precocious, confident, sparkling little actress embodied an optimism for which her country yearned.

Liverpool manager Bill Shankly was once challenged with the story that for their wedding anniversary treat he had taken his wife to a Rochdale match. ‘Sheer nonsense,’ he replied. ‘It was her birthday. Would I have got married during the football season? And anyway it was Rochdale Reserves.’ Shankly may have taken it to extremes, but there is a man/woman thing over sport. Women simply cannot register its importance, not even the saintly Mrs Oakley. Having missed the last race at Sandown on Saturday to drive 90 minutes back to Oxfordshire in time to pick her up from the station, I thought I would be doing OK, brownie points-wise. I was rapidly proved wrong. We arrived home just in time for the second half of England v.

Here in the valley of the River Tove in south Northamptonshire my chickens are laying copiously, my ducks are quacking loudly, and my Jack Russell, Polly, is yapping gaily in celebration of a great victory: the Spanish energy company, which for more than three years has been threatening to desecrate this pleasant bit of countryside with a line of eight giant wind turbines, each taller than Big Ben, has suddenly said it is abandoning the plan after deciding that it is not feasible.

I have never supported the death penalty. Maybe I was influenced when I was six or seven years old by the fact that our next-door neighbour in Campden Hill Square, west London, was a woman who devoted her life to campaigning for its abolition. She was born Violet Dodge in Surrey in 1882, the daughter of a washerwoman and of a ‘coal porter’ (a person whose job is to carry sacks of coal). She herself had worked for a while as a scullery maid, but eventually became immensely rich for inventing and manufacturing Shavex, the first brushless shaving-cream. She also married a Belgian painter called Jean Van der Elst, who died suddenly in 1934 and in whose memory she dedicated herself to the campaign against capital punishment.