'I'm sure it won't be long before Thady kicks me off the ticket - I don't want him talking to Charlie Johnston!'

It's a sunny spring morning in Newmarket and there's even a sense that summer is about to buck its ideas up and spare us the agonising wait. It's what Thady Gosden calls the "three-day sweet spot", when everybody in Newmarket is happy that there has been neither too much rain, nor too little, the ground has some justifiable 'good' in it and all is right with the world.

It won't last, we know that, but if there's one time of the year when we want a guaranteed place in the sun for racing, it's surely right now.

"We had spring in February and it all warmed up and we thought it was marvellous, but the whole of March and April was cold and wet, we were training on all-weathers and then running in heavy ground," recalls John Gosden, acknowledging that he and his colleagues, with their meteorological obsession, are "just like farmers", but unable to help himself.