THE WEIGHING ROOM KEEPS ME YOUNG(ISH)!

IT’S A surreal life, the jockey life, like still being in school. I’m in the weighing room every day with kids as young as 16, and I’m over 50, and we’re just a big family. We don’t all love each other all the time — we cross each other, we argue and all that — but overall we get on fine. We travel together, we eat together, we ride together, and when I’m in that bubble I never get old. The weighing room is our one private space in an arena where we’re otherwise on show the whole time. There’s endless banter, jokes and card games with piles of cash in the middle, several grand sometimes. ‘Come on, lads, time to saddle up’, and the cries of ‘Just finishing this game!’ When you come in as an apprentice, your peg is the one at

the far end. The most senior guys are next to the door because after the door you’re out. When I started the room was full of men like Walter Swinburn, Ray Cochrane, Greville Starkey and Pat Eddery. Now I get to be the one by the door, hanging on by my fingernails as the young ones want to kick me out. When I look at them I see myself as I was all those years ago: when they look at me they see their future, an old guy who has to wear glasses to read the form. Pat Eddery always refused to wear glasses, even when his vision got longer than his arms. ‘Frankie!’ he’d yell. ‘Read this for me! Where am I drawn?’ I used to laugh at him and call him a blind old bat — and now I’m just the same as he was then. There’s always one old codger in the room and if you can’t see who it is then it’s you.