So 50 is too old to be a father, is it? By what measure? Charlie Chaplin, Anthony Quinn and Saul Bellow all managed to sire children in their eighties. My own dad showed stamina in the field by fathering my oldest brother at the age of 54, and follow...

Look! There' s Great Yews and the gallops, I think. That's surely Homington which, as a tiny child, I called Somming – so my mother never ceased to tell me. And that tache, no larger than this fleck of ash, could that be the house beside the Ebble sh...