this is my website. go away!

​As I have become older, then older still, the number of people I admire has lessened. The sports I am currently interested has dropped, also, with athletics and women’s football the only sports that come anywhere near to my dedication to horse racing. To my own disbelief – where have the years gone – I have followed horse racing for over 60-years, since I was 8 or 9 when my parents told me to watch television while they sneaked up the road to buy me a birthday present. If only they knew that on that fateful Saturday afternoon by simply switching on the television, they were giving me the present of a lifetime. Even now, I recall the opening sequence of Grandstand and the images of the sport B.B.C. covered in those days displayed in the 4 lenses of those old-fashioned cameras they used. A race at Ascot represented horse racing, with the white and black colours of the Macdonald-Buchanen family in front coming into the straight. It’s odd what you remember, isn’t it?
The writers of the Racing Post, as a collective, I admire the most, these days. I do not, I must make clear, envy them or hold any jealousy against them. They do a job I could never achieve to the satisfaction of a taskmaster editor. Tom Kerr has done a half-decent job in his tenure as editor, even if some aspects of the changes that have occurred in recent times, I must take issue with. Racing journalists should, in my opinion, write their reports directly from the racecourse. These days, it seems, reports on meetings are put together through watching the racing channels, except, of course, on the high days of the big meetings. I may be wrong and if I am right, it is doubtless a measure introduced to save money. It certainly saves space in the paper for the advertisements that go a long way to paying the staff, plus the over-burden of so many tipsters.
I digress. My fall-back position nowadays is to moan and to gripe to the point I make a fool of myself. 
As someone who has never had the ability to think through a problem, relying on instinct and the time-honoured manner of ‘making it up as I go along’, I admire writers with the dexterity and clarity of word to dilate and express their opinion into a thousand-words or less, whilst at the same time making clear the other side of the coin. Many times their view coincides with my own, yet where I fog my views by simply believing in my argument, the Racing Post journalist conducts the research needed to put all the ducks (facts) in a concise and entertaining row.
David Jennings is currently my favourite of the first-team line-up at the Racing Post as I admire the lightness and humour of his work. Though, if there were a poll to determine the readers’ favourite racing journalist, my vote would go to Patrick Mullins, an amateur jockey who David Jennings described as ‘having refined riding down to no longer riding losers’. I believe he remains the leader of the jockeys’ championship in Ireland.
But I admire them all, especially Peter Thomas’ work and Lewis Porteous, who is growing in stature article by article. Bill Barber is a wonderful writer, even if he confined to the less interesting, though obviously vital at this moment in time, political racing issues. The financial interrogation of punters is affront to civil liberty and the aims of the Gambling Commission is a threat to the existence of the sport. But couldn’t Tom Kerr give its readers a rest from the subject for a day or two? It’s not as if the paper can tell us anything we do not already know.
I digress (again).
I do not shadow the Post’s journalist. I occasionally form ideas for this website from what they write, occasionally disagreeing with their viewpoint, even if my rebuffs do not possess the quality and insight to sway anyone to my way of thinking. I know my place and it is here at not quite 6 am, the only time of the day my brain functions anywhere close to full capacity to enable me to write anything close to what I mean to say.
One of my favourite comedy programmes of all-time is ‘The Big Bang Theory’. The main character, Sheldon Cooper, is a simpleton in the body of a genius and he imposes very unsocial personal rules on his flat-mate and circle of friends, friends that are really the friends of his flat-mate. One of his rules is that he doesn’t want anyone to go into his bedroom. ‘No one is allowed in my room,’ he would say whenever anyone breached the sanctity of his bedroom. 
I take a similar view with this website. ‘It’s my website. You’re not supposed to visit my website’. It is, I know, a very unsociable attitude to take when posting onto a very public platform. Though I did cast my net as widely as my bank balance would allow when I first established horseracingmatters.com as time has passed, I have withdrawn into my shell and write only for the satisfaction of my mental health. I do not, and never have, suffered from any form of loneliness and can easily live my life as a recluse; the hardship is having no one in my circle of acquaintances to discuss horse racing matters with. Thoughts and ideas unexpressed become anchors that drag the spirit downwards and this website keeps me safely moored to the capstan of the living life.
So, in as friendly a manner as I able to cobble together – Go away! No one is allowed in my website’.
Thank you for your visit. Don’t come again!