'It was relationships, finances... I lost everything because of racing'

There's skint and there's skint, but when Milton Harris began his eight-year penance as a racehorse trainer without a licence, he was pretty skint.

"I was literally turning the sofa upside down to see if I could find enough money to buy a loaf of white bread," he says, as his small army of young staff troop into the kitchen for a restorative breakfast of doughnuts and pastries.

Had the taxman known Harris had loose change secreted about his furniture, he might have been minded to impound the offending item and have a good rummage himself, such was the zeal with which Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs pursued the down-at-heel handler for a sizeable chunk of unpaid 'beeswax'. Mercy was a rare and precious commodity at the time, even if Harris expected precious little.