A mighty night, with sadly one absentee

I look rather different today. Yesterday evening was a really fun night. Emma organised a quiz in aid of 'Save Historic Newmarket' to raise funds to cope with the necessary costs of running this organisation which tries to keep a check on the worst excesses of the Forest Heath Planning Department, which left to its own devices might be liable to make this town unfit for the training of horses and to make any signs of the town's heritage hard to detect. Tattersalls very kindly provided the premises where the teams were seated at tables of six. The team of which I was a member also included Richard Ward, Sara Beckett, Hugh Fraser, Jane Chapple-Hyam and Larry Stratton; and at the start of the evening I looked pretty much as usual (as pictured above with Jane).

And by the end of the evening, thanks to a fund-raising stunt which, inexplicably, saw people donating extra money to the charity in advance of my beard being removed, I looked different. As these photographs aren't huge and were taken under artificial light, you might not see much of a difference, but basically I now look rather like I did 20 years ago; and 20 years ago I was 23, but looked 12.

Anyway, that was only a small post script to the quiz, which was a really fun event. Emma, with the help especially of Dean Roethemeier and Janet Anderson, did an excellent job in making this event happen, which was great as it raised a lot of money (over £3,000 I think) for the cause and also provided a lot of fun for a lot of people. Nick Luck and Lorna Bradburne very kindly acted as comperes, which was very good of them - particularly of Nick, who lives in London, as that obviously meant a fair journey for him. A journey, incidentally, which was also undertaken by a few contestants, including representatives of both the Racing Post and of Racenews.

The questions were very good. It was a racing quiz with a Newmarket bent, and I'm both pleased and slightly bashful about saying that our team won it. The pleasure of winning was obvious, particularly as there were some really good racing brains in opposition, including both Tony Morris (left) and John Gosden (below, cogitating as to just how he and Brent Thomson managed to get the subsequent 5-time Group One winner Halling so well handicapped as a three-year-old, as recalled by one of the questions).

The reasons for the slight embarrassment of winning are also plain, as obviously our victory raised the possibility of suspicions of insider-trading on my behalf - but I'd hope that I'd have enough of a reputation for honesty for any such questions not to be raised. As it happened, I did have one (and only one) clue as to a question - and that proved to be a question to which I didn't know the answer! I'd noted that Emma had taken the biography of Etti Plesch off the shelf, so guessed that there would be question on one or other of the two Derby winners which she owned (Psidium, who was trained in Newmarket; and Henbit, who wasn't - but whose Champion Hurdle-winning son Kribensis was). I naturally didn't do anything about 'swotting up' on these two horses, and then found that the question involved the number of husbands which she had. And I didn't know. I'd also seen Richard Onslow's book 'The Heath And The Turf' being perused, but anyone could guess that that would be a source of information for such a quiz - and anyone who hasn't read it (I read it maybe ten years ago) doesn't deserve to win a Newmarket-centred racing quiz anyway, as it is pretty much required reading on the subject. Anyway, we won, which was both nice and slightly unfortunate - but I wasn't going deliberately to write in wrong answers just to ensure that the team wouldn't win!

The removal of the beard was very straightforward, as Angie Winter used clippers on me, which allayed any fears of a very sharp knife and my jugular vein being worryingly close to each other. It was a particularly good method bearing in mind that the angels (Aisling and Gemma) had decided to see whether pulling it out mightn't be the funnier method - funnier for them, but definitely not for me! So the end result was that I definitely drew a very easy straw as regards fund-raising stunts: it was certainly a lot easier than walking a mile every hour for 1,000 hours.

In fact, it was the easiest of the stunts undertaken or suggested yesterday evening. Particular plaudits in this respect must go to Jason Singh (Tattersalls' statutory Australian, seen here heckling Nick and Lorna) who bravely sported a tweed Gleason for the evening. I don't know how much he raised, but it must have been quite a lot to make his ordeal worthwhile. But the best cheer of all should have gone up for Simon Waterhouse (seen here on the Angels' table, on the left). Simon is our local survivalist/extreme sportsman, and he spunkily offered to throw himself through one of the restaurant's plate glass windows to raise money for the cause.

He'd have done it, and raised a large sum, too - but for being made aware of the unfortunate fact that even the thousands he would surely have raised would all have been swallowed up in paying for the replacement of the window and for his resultant hospitalization. But fair play to him - and also for being the only person in the room to know the answer (welly-wanging) to the question of the final of which sport takes place in the Yorkshire village of Upper Thong. (Simon, apparently, knew the answer because he once took part in the competition, having got through to the quarter-finals in 2005).

Anyway, enough of this nonsense, because I can't end this report of the mighty night without broaching a far more serious subject, which is that our very dear friend Camilla Milbank, who would have been sharing the organisation with Emma, was an absentee because she is in Addenbrooke's Hospital in the early stages of what, God willing, will be a complete recovery from a serious spinal injury sustained in a fall on the gallops on Saturday morning. She is currently in a bad way, even though she is showing characteristic fortitude in the face of massive adversity. If collective good wishes count for anything, she will be back to normal very quickly, so let us hope and pray that that will indeed be the case.