Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1993 and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a jockey and a racing journalist. After Eton and Oxford he abandoned a prospective

career in the law to become a junior racing correspondent on the Daily Telegraph. He also

wrote 200 winners as an amateur jockey, nearly winning the Grand National in 1963.

He retired from racing in 1975, worried that his next injury might kill him, but continued

as a journalist, a television commentator and an author.

His passion for horses is tempered by an engaging objectivity.

Racing, he says, is a lovely enthralling, but let's face it, basically insignificant pastime.

He is John, Lord O'Ccy.

Are you confessing in that, John, to devoting your life to something that in your own estimation is really less than worthwhile?

Well, to certainly spend it in a happy, comfortable, insignificant rut.

I think that's true.

Do you, though, as well have any kind of residue of guilt, if you like,

that you didn't follow your father and your grandfather into the law because they were both

rather eminent in their field and you turned your back on all of that for racing didn't you?

Yes, at the time I had a major feeling of guilt and my beloved dad was so wonderful about it that that guilt

really didn't last very long. I felt, and I knew in fact that he'd spent a large amount of money the so-called

educating me for the law and there I was 25 having never earned an honest penny in my life and I suddenly in the middle

of the bar exams said I was going to be a juvenile racing correspondent and he might easily have bought a hole in the ceiling and

exploded but he didn't at all he said the important thing is to do something that

you enjoy but I wonder why he didn't. Your grandfather had been a Lord Chief Justice

...