COMEDY Of Errors and Lanzarote and Birds Nest and Dramatist were just names really. They weren’t really horses, not in a small mind that had the concentration span of a small fish.

They were the names that we gave to horses when we raced them around the kitchen table mind you, around the salt and the sugar and the butter dish and the orange cup, and over the dominoes that were fences, two for the chair and a drop on the landing side of the book for Becher’s Brook (Becher’s Book), although what Comedy Of Errors was doing jumping Becher’s Brook, we never really knew, nor did we ever really care. Strange how some things make less sense with the benefit of hindsight.

Monksfield was real though, the size of him, and Sea Pigeon. Sometimes Monksfield won and sometimes Sea Pigeon won, that was all we knew, but we were Monksfield fans because he was the Irish horse.

We were also Tied Cottage fans. There was the day that we watched the Gold Cup in Paddy Hodgins’ house. Dad was the headmaster, Paddy Hodgins (Paddy Hodgins’ dad) was the harbourmaster, they often had important things to discuss on important days, and Gold Cup day 1979 must have been one such day.

We stopped at Paddy Hodgins’ house on the way home from school that day, and we all sat around the television in the sitting room, cheered when Tied Cottage jumped the second last fence, groaned when he came down at the last, leaving it clear for Alverton and Jonjo O’Neill.

At least Jonjo is Irish, Dad said.

We never won the Gold Cup, we knew that. Ireland. It was like the World Cup in that regard.

When you are small, when you don’t have too many years on your CV, every one of them stands out. When the time from one Gold Cup to the next represents one-sixth or one-seventh or one-eighth of your entire existence, they don’t all morph together.

Like, you don’t wonder if Bregawn won the Gold Cup before Silver Buck did, in the same way as you try to remember who came first, Imperial Commander or Long Run or Synchronised or Bobs Worth. (It was Imperial Commander.)

And in the same way as Comedy Of Errors wasn’t real in our eyes, Midnight Court wasn’t real, not in our memories, just the photo of him and John Francome jumping the final fence, with the red number seven to the right of the shot and no other horse in it.

By the time Dawn Run came around though, it was real all right. We managed to get into the betting shop, still in our school uniforms, perfectly timed between the time that the final bell rang in the school and the time that the final bus left for home, just in time to see her come home just in front of Cima.

Two years later, we were still in class when they set off in the Gold Cup. At the back of the chemistry lab, our ears pressed to the yellow transistor radio that Francis Carroll had smuggled in.

Nobody thought to point out that, if you were going to smuggle a transistor radio into the chemistry lab, probably better if it wasn’t a psychedelic yellow one.

Maybe it was the radio that gave us away, or maybe it was the muffled exuberance when we realised that she was going to win, or that she had won. Either way, Brother Finn was fairly unequivocal in his demand that we tell him what was going on.

“We were listening to the Gold Cup, Sir.”

Brace yourself for the wrath of the teacher, or detention, or both.

“Well, did she win?”

And then we got there. To Cheltenham. We got there on the Monday night, arrived after dark, but we still had to go up to the course and up to the top of the stands, and look down, trying to make out the winning post beneath us and the final fence, and the second last fence on the New Course, just about, but not on the Old Course, squirreled away, as it used to be, on the far side of the home turn. And you felt the tingles.

They were nothing compared to what you felt the following day though, the following morning, Tuesday, Champion Hurdle morning, when you got to the track in daylight and when you were able to see the course, with the hills rising up behind it, the green baize that you had only seen on television, and the history of it warmed you from the base of your spine to the back of your neck. To walk down the back straight on the turf on which legends had raced, to dip your toe into the water (literally), to put your boot against the take-off board of the open ditch, to circumnavigate the turns, the undulations, and to know that you were there. Privileged to walk where giants had walked, run, galloped and fallen.

You didn’t dare think that Imperial Call really had a chance of winning the Gold Cup. You knew that he was a classy young staying chaser, the Hennessy winner at Leopardstown. But against the might of One Man, the Hennessy winner at Newbury, the King George winner? And Ireland never won the Gold Cup, remember?

In 1996, you had to go back to Dawn Run 10 years earlier to find the nearest Irish-trained Gold Cup winner. And before Dawn Run? Davy Lad in 1977.

But Imperial Call did win the Gold Cup in 1996. Fergie Sutherland’s horse coasted down to the bottom of the hill, Conor O’Dwyer motionless on his back in the Lisselan Farms colours, stride for stride with One Man, then left the grey horse behind him on the run back up it. And scenes in the winner’s enclosure afterwards, hardly standing room even for the horse.

Priceless.