If you are looking for a great family day out at this time of year, you could do a lot worse that your local point-to-point. The grass roots level of National Hunt Racing – these meetings are the bottom rung of the sport which works all the way up to the Cheltenham Gold Cup and the Grand National.

Even at this humble level the races are all over a gruelling three miles and the fences are all at least 4’6” high. This is a demanding test and requires a great deal of stamina and courage from the horses involved.

Last weekend found us all at the Royal Cornwall Showground just outside Wadebridge for the Western point-to-point. The great thing about these local events is that you really are in the thick of the action. As you lean against the rails you are literally only a few feet from the pounding hooves of the horse as they fly past; as you trudge back to the enclosure after the race (tearing up your betting slip as you go) you are literally rubbing shoulders with the owners and trainers; and when you go for a pee you are quite likely to be standing next to a jockey in full racing silks!

Before each race you get a chance to choose your nag as it is paraded around the ring and then it is off to the row of bookmakers to place you bet. A quick look at the odds on offer and you will find one or two horses are ‘odds on’ (meaning that your £1 stake will only win you a matter of pence) while the rest are 20/1 or over  - which could net you £20 , but more than likely means that they won’t even make the distance.

The kids are amazed at the prospect of winning so much money for so little outlay, and with five different horses backed in each race we were certain of a fair share of winners. It is only at these provincial meetings that bookmakers don’t wince when you walk up and ask to put a quid on each of five different horses, and after each race one of the kids (the one who had inadvertently picked the favourite) would run back to the bookies to claim his/her winnings.

The net result of all this is that you only have to lay out £5 for each race for having the joy of seeing one of your dear children win enough to buy themselves a small chocolate bar. Lets hope we can wean them off of this addiction before they build a super casino in Cornwall!

…type-1-Transporter-of-livestock-with-a-certificate-of-competence….I do!

I doubt Chris Tarrent would be sitting quite so pretty had he used the above as a pitch for his quiz show. However, Wednesday found me sweating it out with eight other farmers in a room at the National Farmers Union office at Exeter, faced with 28 questions about transporting livestock. There were - of course - four answers to each question to choose from, but crucially no 50/50 option and no ‘phone a friend’.

The prize – a certificate of competence in transporting livestock distances over 65km. Something I have been doing (like all other farmers) quite competently for the last twenty years.

Experience has taught me though, that despite the temptation to buck against such pointless bureaucracy by starting a one man protest of non-conformity, it is best to grasp the nettle and get on with it, as somewhere down the line the lack of the correct paperwork will come back to bite you in the leg – usually costing you either time, money or extreme hassle. So I duly stumped up the required £33, sent off a passport photo (which I presume means that the certificate will take the form of yet another piece of laminated plastic competing for room with my credit cards in my wallet), and wended my way to Exeter.

There was due to be a half hour workshop on the regulations immediately before the test, so I presumed that there would be no need to actually read the glossy information pamphlet they had supplied before I got there. Wrong!

The young chap giving the presentation started by saying “I wont bore you with the details of the regulations as I’m sure you will have read them by now so I shall just give you a brief overview of the background to the new regs” – oh shit.

Luckily, during the PowerPoint presentation the other farmers are giving full vent to their frustrations about how ‘that’ wouldn’t work in ‘this’ situation, and surmising that the ‘pen pushers that wrote this rubbish have probably never even seen the back end of a cow’, giving me ample time to scan the regulations before we got down to business.

For the test, each of us had a laptop and a different 28 questions randomly picked from a pool of 400. I pity the poor soul who had the job of posing 400 different questions from such scant material and then dream up a staggering 1600 possible answers; and some of my questions revealed the extent to which he must have been scraping the barrel by the end. It was all very commonsense stuff and I’m sure most members of the public could have gained the pass rate of 21 correct answers, without never having been near a livestock trailer in their lives.

However I did manage to get a couple wrong and on the drive back I was wracking my brains to work out where I had slipped up (they didn’t give you a print out of the test presumably in case you passed on the questions and answers to your neighbours). Eventually I deduced that the answer to the question on ‘the condition of a healthy cows skin’ should have been ‘soft and supple’ – not ‘dry and tight’.

Well, all I can say in my defence is that they obviously aren’t talking about my hairy Galloway cows (pictured), whose gnarly weathered hides are as tough as old boots. Ironically, most people on the street would have probably guessed the right answer correctly – whilst my 'experienced' opinion of dry (as in absence of sweat – a sure sign of distress in an animal) and tight (having bent many a needle trying to inject my leathery cows) got it wrong!