FESTIVALS come in many shapes and many sizes these days.

Finland has a wife-carrying festival, Canada has a hair-freezing festival and Spain has its tomato festival.

England is not immune to such things either - there is a toe-wrestling festival and a cheese-rolling Festival - while, in Ireland, my home village of Clonmellon, Co Westmeath, hosts a potato festival.

National Hunt racing has a few festivals as well and they do not come any bigger than Cheltenham - it is to National Hunt racing what Glastonbury is to the music industry. Less drugs, I hope, but off level weights when it comes to other pleasures and simply being an annual highlight for its regular visitors.

Sadly there will not be many regulars in attendance this year but one thing will remain the same. The build-up will give us four weeks of questions about the races themselves, to be followed (hopefully) by four days of answers.

For all, there will be a common ground to be enjoyed when it comes to discussion and theories, and the enthusiasm and caution that they generate - the excitement unites people who may own half a county (and bet in fivers) with those that may owe half a county (and bet in hundreds).

Many popular sports involve the prospects of just two teams, or players, but horseracing has countless potential outcomes. Cheltenham owes much to its timing, coming after four winter months, when feature weekend races can be watched by ‘outside people’ when they are guilt-free indoors. At no other time of the year are so many people familiar with racing form which, combined with a bit of spring in the air, forms a perfect symmetry of anticipation.

Racing people tend to like information and knowledge- racing quizzes are a daily feature of the Racing Post - and racing-related table quizzes invariably attract a wide cross-section of enthusiasts. Therefore, here a few quiz-style questions, while the answers will follow in some of my memorable Cheltenham experiences to dates.

Q. Name the first two Gold Cup winners to be trained by a female trainer?

Many people have been going to Cheltenham for much longer than me, several as an owner, trainer, jockey, a member of the support services that keep it all going, or the media bringing the story to those not lucky enough to be there.

I have simply been an enthusiastic visitor, with one foot in the door of the engine room thanks to a childhood in Lambourn followed by 30 years in Goffs, making some of the key players part of my life for a considerable time.

As a child, close neighbours included such legendary trainers as Fred Winter, Fulke Walwyn and Jenny Pitman. From being born (in the year after Arkle’s last Gold Cup) until leaving school, those trainers won three Champion Hurdles for the village, Bula twice and Lanzarote, and three Gold Cups with The Dikler, Midnight Court and Burrough Hill Lad.

Winter and Walwyn continue to appear in the names of Festival races but arguably it was Jenny Pitman (whose success with Burrough Hill Lad was repeated with Garrison Savannah in 1991) that broke the most significant glass ceiling in becoming the first woman to train the winners of England’s two most famous steeplechases. I even made it to the meeting in 1985, the year after leaving school, for Forgive ‘N Forget’s Gold Cup, but big screens were still a thing of the future and I spent much of the race studying the different patterns in the tweed suits that obliterated any view of the actual race.

Q: Name the trainer/jockey combination who most recently won both the Champion Hurdle and the Gold Cup at the same Festival?

Q: Which jockey rode Willie Mullins’ first Cheltenham Festival winner?

In 1995, I took a six-month sabbatical from Goffs to see some parts of the world while the opportunity still existed. By mid-March I was in Sri Lanka but events in the Cotswolds were not overlooked. My travel diary from that week reads:

A highlight for me was the discovery that many Sri Lankan betting shops beam in SIS live from England each evening and produce a free racing paper with the runners, results and some hijacked editorial from English racing papers.

Kandy’s best betting shop’s VIP lounge has an entry charge of 300 rupees (about £4), which is then reimbursed in betting vouchers, with beer and drinks served to the more affluent punters. No smoking allowed inside but several visits to the street a satisfactory option.

Seated at a wooden table with new-found friends we watch an Irish one-two in the first two races but few were deflected from supporting the hero Jamie Osborne on Large Action in the Champion Hurdle. Unfortunately for all, only Alderbrook separated them from victory and I, with money lost on Danoli, left Cheltenham after the third race by rickshaw.

The betting office in Colombo the next day was even smarter, like a casino with a full free drinks service in hors d’oeuvre. Carpets, mirrors, lots of rich people here.

I was summoned to meet the local Mr Big, owner of three casinos and surrounded by silent, respectful colleagues, one of whom run his bets to the counter. He was unfamiliar with any owners including J.P. McManus, until I explained, and he particularly appreciated his hefty success on the green and gold hoops (at 7/1) in the four mile amateur chase.

That first race saw a first Festival winner for Willie Mullins in the shape of Tourist Attraction, ridden by Mark Dwyer. The Arkle went to Klairon Davis and the following day’s National Hunt Chase winner was Front Line for Jonjo O Neill and John Berry.

Alderbrook’s Champion Hurdle was the first half of a memorable double that week for trainer Kim Bailey and jockey Norman Williamson, as they took the Gold Cup two days later with Master Oats- an achievement not repeated by any trainer/jockey combination since.

The dots here are nicely joined because Master Oats is a graduate of our sales at Doncaster and a photograph of the horse and jockey is the first picture you encounter in the Goffs UK Hawick office.

Further connectivity was that Bailey trained exactly opposite my childhood home in Lambourn, while 20 years later Norman and his wife Janet would become close neighbours on the Meath/ Westmeath border.

The Williamsons’ Oak Tree Farm has become an outstanding producer of National Hunt store horses, as well as breeze-up two-year-olds on the flat. Indeed his Goffs Land Rover graduates include Grade 1 winner Oscar Whisky, consecutive winners of the Land Rover Bumper and the eye-catching Tinahely point-to-point winner Guily Billy, who was sold for £310,000 in December to Cheveley Park.

Q. Who are the last three horses to win different races at three consecutive Festivals?

My wife Alice and I started going to Cheltenham on a regular basis about 15 years ago, after our first two children were born. Fortunately that coincided perfectly with the building success of Land Rover Sale graduates at the meeting and an opportunity to relish some added connection to the proceedings.

Hardy Eustace’s Champion Hurdles were followed by Brava Inca and Newmill rewarding the relatively small Irish yards of the unrelated Murphys, Colm and John.

There was Imperial Commander’s Gold Cup and Champion Chases for Big Zeb and Finians Rainbow. Before you knew it, along came Faugheen and Altior.

There was a Placepot win in 2011- paying an enormous £900 to a £1 stake- that we shared with a great man that we only ever meet at Cheltenham despite living only an hour away.

There was that remarkable reception given to Sprinter Sacre when he reclaimed his two-mile crown in 2016 but perhaps the single most enjoyable day for me was the second day of the 2018 Festival.

Samcro, who had come via the Land Rover Sale and the Aintree Sale, delivered on his expectations in the opener and Altior, the poster boy of Goffs National Hunt sales, won the Champion Chase and, in doing so, become only the second horse since Flyingbolt in 1966 to win three different races in three consecutive years at the Festival.

(The only other horse to achieve this in the intervening years was another Nicky Henderson charge, and Goffs graduate, Bobs Worth.)

Later that day, Tiger Roll won the cross-country race, so anybody connected to the Gigginstown team had already had two runs at the champagne offered by the Cheltenham winners’ room. When Veneer Of Charm, owned by Martin Wasylocha, a close friend of several O’Leary cohorts, won the Fred Winter at 33/1, any restraint went out the window altogether.

Roll on to when a prize-giving again involves a throng of friends and relations, and when a photograph of a crowded Cheltenham is published not in accusation of social irresponsibility but as a snapshot of thousands of people enjoying a day of championship sport, accompanied by the excitement and emotion that it enables.

I hope that I will again be lucky enough to be among the faces in the crowd.?