Racing goes back to the future at Wincanton on Friday when Henrietta Knight, the trainer of three-time Gold Cup winner Best Mate, saddles her first runner since 'retiring' to care for her late husband Terry Biddlecome in 2012.
In the intervening eleven years, Knight has also lost her sister Cici and Cici's husband, Lord Vestey, prominent owners when she was training for the first time, and Ballywalter, owned by Knight's niece Mary, will carry Cici Vestey's side .
"It will be a family affair," she emphasizes. "It will be quite moving to see my sister's colors on my first runner."
However, she doesn't think about it, but rather feels a certain fear about her return to the training ranks. "I have very cold feet about my first runner this time," she says. "When I started in 1989, my first runner was a winner. So much has been written since I announced my comeback, everyone is watching and expecting. Back then we just went to Bangor with a pointer that fell more often than not and no one expected anything.
"I hope he runs well, he is a nice horse, but not a star of the future, although we will have a lot of fun with him. He's not very fast. He won an Irish point-to-point about nine weeks ago, but he'll love the mud.
The 77-year-old Knight returns, she thinks, knowing more about training than when she retired, having written The Jumping Game, which gave her unprecedented access to 30 trainers to write about their methods.
She is also 'assisted' by Brendan Powell, himself a former successful trainer who has assisted Joseph O'Brien for the past five years.
"Brendan is a tremendous asset," she says. "He told someone he wished he had known what he had learned with Joseph during his training. It's like skinning a cat; There are many ways to train a horse and horses respond differently to different methods.
"I don't think Best Mate would have responded well to a large garden. We pampered him wonderfully, wrapped him in cotton wool and I'm not sure how he would have coped as one of many in a large chain.'
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Even a seventy-year-old can dream and even though the chance that another best partner will walk into West Lockinge is small, she is clear in her goals. "Tell me, can lightning strike twice?" she asks rhetorically. "I want a small group of horses that can win races. If a good horse comes out of the pack, that's a bonus.
"If it's good enough to play at the Cheltenham Festival that's a double bonus and if it's good enough for first place that's a triple bonus. I would love to walk through that paddock again with a winner - it's not a feeling you can explain or describe.
"Of course we have to win races and make it worthwhile. We have some nice four-year-olds who will win bumpers in the spring, but we are a little short of older horses and the time to get them is not now, but at the end of the season."
At a time of great uncertainty in sports, you can either take the position that she is angry or take your hat off to her for going back in.
"I could have continued doing what I was doing, which was running a livery stable and teaching other people's horses to jump," she continues. "I like a busy, bustling garden, but I sent the horses back and they won for other people. You don't see through it, someone else does. There is some satisfaction in that, but I would like to continue with it."
There's a lot of superstition in racing - many trainers don't wear green to the races - but the first time around, Knight took quirkiness to a new level and that, it seems, won't change any time soon.
"If you enter a house through one door, you must also leave through that door," she begins. "You are never allowed to climb the stairs, if you say goodbye and have forgotten something and go back inside, you must sit down before leaving again. I don't like one magpie, I hate black cats crossing the road, a robin in the house is a harbinger of death. But I don't mind walking under a ladder, 13 or green.
"It was written that if Best Mate played in the Gold Cup, I would hide in the toilet, but that was a myth. Sometimes I would watch or walk away, but having watched all of his first Gold Cup in 2002, I had to watch them all and do everything the same.
"I backed every other horse in the race except Best Mate because I wanted some fun if he was beaten. That cost me £800-£900 a year!
"The biggest one, though, was hay and straw. Seeing a load of straw on the way to the races is lucky, but hay is terrible. You pull with straw, you pay with hay. Before the 2004 Gold Cup, I had the straw merchant deliver to the yard that morning!"
There isn't much Knight hasn't done in her 76 years; from enjoying a deb, gaining a degree in teaching from Oxford (she's a B.Ed) and teaching history and biology at a local girls' convent school, to finishing 12th at the three-day Badminton event to breeding prize-winning Connemaras and training the only horse since Arkle to win three Gold Cups.
As a royal friend for 11 years, she was invited to the Royal Lodge on the trot by the late Queen Mother for the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes weekend in July. "I'm not really a fan of pomp and circumstance, so I started worrying about it from about three weeks," she recalls.
"The bath was open for you, you were given breakfast in bed and upon arrival your suitcase was thrown away from you to be unpacked by a maid. I was so worried about someone else unpacking for me that every year before I went I would go to M&S to buy new underwear to make sure it was spotless! But she was a great hostess and I enjoyed talking racing and life with her.
Henrietta Knight's Racing Life Part II will provide as many anecdotes as winners. Terry Biddlecome, she is adamant, would have approved. "He hated it when I gave up the license to care for him," she says.
