‘Treated like royalty now, them jockeys are,’ he announced with a certain degree of envy detectable in his tone. ‘Spanking-new changing rooms with individual power showers, warm-up area, physio room, free café, relaxing area, the lot.’

Not like when I started riding, I thought. Back in those days, at some courses, you were lucky if you found an old wooden chair in the changing room to put your day clothes on. The communal showers had been uniformly stark, with aged, cracked and rust-stained white tiling, while the hot water emanating from them would often only last for the first few races. Refreshments had consisted solely of a drinking-water tap in the gents’ loos and a tray of fruitcake squares, universally known as weighing-room cake, put out on a table at the end of the day.

Not that I begrudged the modern jockeys their creature comforts. They put their lives on the line every time they went out to race, so why shouldn’t they have a comfortable relaxing area and a free café, if and when they got back alive?

It was still nearly an hour and a half until the first race, so I leaned on the rail by the new unsaddling area and waited for the participants to arrive.

Just like the trainers, most of the jockeys riding here today were those who worked mainly at the northern English tracks, or those in Scotland, and I knew very few of them by sight. It also didn’t help that some of the young men riding now hadn’t even been born when I’d been forced to retire. The racecard helped a little by having a tiny photograph of each rider printed on it next to the horse they were to ride but, even so, I thought I might have a problem identifying any of them.

When I’d first started riding, jockeys had always travelled to and from the races wearing a suit and tie, to impress their employers—the trainers and the owners. Indeed, the majority of racegoers were also attired in a similar fashion, just like audiences at the London theatres. But, as in so many situations in the twenty-first century, casual and comfortable was now the norm for all, but the jockeys were still fairly easy to spot. For a start, they were generally smaller than the population as a whole, and they mostly carried a holdall slung over their shoulders containing their riding kit, often with their whip sticking out the top.

As the first few early birds started arriving, I stood by the glass door of the weighing room and asked each one in turn if they were represented by Anton Valance. Most just shook their heads and pushed past me into the sanctuary of the changing rooms. One young man, however, stopped and stared at me.

‘Weren’t you once Sid Halley?’ he said.

I smiled. ‘I still am.’

‘Yeah, of course,’ he said with a laugh. ‘I just meant—’