Camilla Swift

I’m sure every ‘horsey’ person has been asked the same question: ‘Who should I put my money on in the Grand National?’ No matter whether you’re a dressage rider or a four-in-hand driver, come mid-April everyone wants to hear your views on the most-watched horse race in Britain. £300 million is expected to be bet on the race itself (Saturday at 5.15pm, if you’d forgotten); the most bet on any single horse race in the world. But who is it worth putting your money on? It’s a tough call, for so many reasons. For starters, unless there are any last-minute changes, there will be 40 horses at the start line – so a sizeable field.

In large cities, a school can weave itself into the fabric of its locality almost without anyone noticing it’s there. But in smaller towns and villages a school, particularly a large one, can play a much greater part in the day-to-day life of its inhabitants. In some towns and villages, the school is even the focal point. Take Peaslake in the Surrey Hills. In 1993, the village school was closed down as it was considered ‘too small’ to be viable. When a campaign by local residents and parents to keep it open failed and government funding was removed, the Peaslake Schools Trust was formed.

International Women’s Day is the official appointed day on which to celebrate women’s achievements. But actually, I’d argue that the first day of the Cheltenham Festival is as good a day as any to celebrate women in racing; and there are lots of them. Women are making their names in racing, on an equal playing field with men, whether it’s International Women’s Day or Christmas Day; a Friday or a Tuesday. Go to any racing yard in the country and it’s likely that many of the staff will be female. It’s a cliché, but girls like ponies, and over half of all stable staff jobs in the UK are filled by women. But historically, racing has very much been a man’s world.

‘There is a profound mismatch between the way we are educating our young and the world we’re educating them for, and what should, and could, be happening.’ So says Sir Anthony Seldon, former headmaster of Wellington College and vice-chancellor of Buckingham University. Seldon is well known for promoting novel ideas when it comes to education. During his time at Wellington he was often in the limelight for his original style of thinking, or ‘visions for education’ as he puts it; for example, his decision to introduce mindfulness into the curriculum there. Seldon isn’t just a teacher, though. He’s also a historian and a political biographer, as well as being a regular on TV and radio, discussing education.

‘Any tips for the National?’ I think anyone who has even a vague connection to a horse has been asked this question over the last week, and it’s a pretty impossible one to answer. With a field of forty and some very tough obstacles to get over safely on the way, all you can really do is look at statistics. As Belinda McClung, one of the owners of last year’s National winner, One for Arthur, put it to me: ‘There isn’t as much pressure in a race like the Grand National, where there are 39 other horses; you can get brought down, fall – anything can happen.

We Brits tend not to be as superstitious as those in some other countries; well at least that's what I thought. In the States, for example, it’s common practice not to have a 13th floor in hotels, for fear it might bring bad luck. No such thing would happen over here, would it? Surely we are far too sensible to worry about silly superstitions like that? But new research appears to show that we are, in fact, just as superstitious as those over the pond. Today is Friday 13th – a day that is famously unlucky, if you believe in those kinds of things, and home insurance company Policy Expert has found that people appear to change their habits when the 13th falls on a Friday, and behave in a more careful way.

When choosing a boarding school for your child, what’s the most important thing to bear in mind? For some it will be the academic results, for others the location, the range of subjects or the variety of extra-curricular activities on offer. But for many, a big concern will be the pastoral side: who will be carrying out the parental role when your child is living away from home? At the majority of boarding schools, matrons bear most of that responsibility. ‘When you take on the responsibility of someone else’s child, it’s very daunting,’ says Rachael McGuire, who has been matron of Matheson’s House at Glenalmond College in Perthshire for 24 years, and is in charge of 40 boys aged between 13 and 18.

To a classic car buff, nothing can beat the sheer joy of owning one for yourself. But is there actually any investment value in them? That’s the question Henry Jeffreys posed in the pages of Spectator Money back in 2016. It’s a difficult one to answer; he discovered that in recent years, classic cars have been so popular that they’ve harmed their own value slightly. As former Top Gear presenter Quentin Willson explained to Jeffreys, there have been ‘too many people getting involved without the requisite knowledge’. Most people who buy a classic car, however, don’t think about it in terms of its future value – although they probably do factor that into the equation.