Jumbo to Jockey: Fasting to the Finishing Post

Jumbo to Jockey

One midlife crisis, a horse

and the diet of a lifetime

DOMINIC PRINCE

For Rose

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Epilogue

Postscript

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

It’s early January and I am standing on the scales, singing. I come from a long line of people who sing out loud. My dad did it and my son Jack has inherited the trait. Not that I have much to sing about where I am standing now, mind. I can’t see my feet and it is only by peering over the expanse of my stomach that I can see, aged forty-seven, I am topping 16½ stone. While it was not always like this, it is not entirely surprising. I was born at the beginning of January 1961 at what was then the London Hospital, Whitechapel, in the East End of London. I weighed in at 11lb 6oz and remained for the rest of the year the fattest baby born at the London Hospital. I find it difficult to believe that my mother has ever forgiven me.

My clothes are tight. The waistband on my trousers cuts into my paunch and the 16-inch collars pinch at my Adam’s apple. The flesh rumples beneath the top button, and it feels like slow strangulation. I have been fighting an unwinnable battle for years, brought on by my own greed and slothfulness. Running for a bus is not nice. Little nodules erupt on the inside of my thighs and they are pretty painful. They are only there because my thighs are too fat and rub together like great elephant legs. I have a constant nagging paranoia about my health, high blood pressure and the possibility of a heart attack and a multitude of other life-threatening diagnoses, and yet I have hardly taken any exercise for two and a half decades.

I’m a middle-aged journalist, with a twenty-a-day fag habit. I drink much more wine than I should, and eat more than almost anyone I know. The prognosis is not ideal. My wife says she fears for the future. ‘What, that I might die?’ I ask, expecting her to break down in self-pitying tears at the prospect. ‘No, that you might have a stroke aged fifty and I’ll be lumbered with looking after you for the rest of my life.’ She’s nothing if not down to earth, my wife.

Although my condition is entirely self-inflicted, in my defence I must say that I do not stuff myself with junk food and drink gallons of lager. My girth has been built, not only on thousands of great restaurant lunches that were traditionally part and parcel of a hack’s life, but on a delicious supply of home cooking. My wife, Rose, is a cookery author and food critic. For the last ten years she has written on a subject she is passionate about, and I have been happily sampling the by-product of her career. We both love eating and are obsessive about buying good food, going to what most people would think extraordinary lengths to eat the best.

In our house in London we grow our own vegetables in old wooden wine boxes and at the cottage in Dorset we plant them in a raised bed in the garden. I make bread from the wonderful oily flour supplied by Mr Stoate from Shaftesbury who mills his wheat between two stones using the River Stirkel to power the milling process. We have even kept sheep. When we were first married we kept a variety called Castlemilk Moorit and more recently I bought eight Texel lambs that we fattened and had killed in our local slaughterhouse. We then feasted on the sweet, crisp-skinned and beautifully butchered animals.

Over the years we have travelled thousands of miles to seek out the most delicious, well-hung, black sides of beef from an array of butchers around the country. The best sausages that I have ever eaten come from John Robinson, a butcher in Stockbridge, Hampshire. Sausages are one of my top ten favourite meals. Mr Robinson sells three tons a week at his tiny shop, on a counter no more than 15 feet long, and he employs around eighteen butchers. The meat and game is exemplary. Every child in the world I have ever met goes mad for Stockbridge sausages, and fights have even broken out over them they’re so good. They mince English shoulder of pork, add sage and other herbs and pump out the sausages by the trayful. They don’t use preservatives, so they won’t do mail order. If you want Robinson’s sausages you have to go and collect them, but the journey is worth it.

A little further down the A30 from Stockbridge, going towards Salisbury, is Hollom Down Growers, a smallholdingcum-market garden where the most luscious soft fruit grows and ripens. In season, there are fields and fields full of huge, sweet strawberries, petite juicy raspberries, and tomatoes with such intense flavours that they might have been grown in Tuscany. Potatoes, leeks, apples, squashes, cucumbers, lettuces, peas, beans and onions can all be found there. And then there is always the creamy, sometimes sharp-flavoured cheeses assembled on the kitchen table for picking at and devouring after dinner in huge swathes of unadulterated, masticating passion.

Rose has always said that she has a terror of running out of food and, like me, she hates to miss a meal. She is sometimes recklessly extravagant when buying food and always buys too much. She does, however, love feeding people and having hordes of friends and family to dinner. On any given night, with our two children, we will eat a joint of well-hung and bloodied beef, then, the following day, we eat stacks of cold, rare roast beef sandwiches or bowls of spiced broth, made from the beef bones, with delicately cut strips of translucent, ruby meat.

Rose does the same with chicken. With the leftovers of a roast she will make a pot of rich stock from the simmered bones. She uses this to make sublime and creamy soups, sometimes with watercress, at other times with squash or celery leaves. Sometimes she scatters pieces of crisp smoked bacon over these soups, or crumbles a piece of fried black pudding, or adds an extra dash of cream. We will then eat the soup with the bread I have baked along with great glaciersized chunks of melting unsalted butter.

More stock goes into the comforting risottos that we eat regularly, unctuous pools of slowly cooked rice scattered with Grana Padano cheese. Sometimes these will have added porcini or asparagus; sometimes they are simply seasoned with saffron or handfuls of chopped fresh herbs.

Without question, my favourite dish is game. In winter we can always look forward to enjoying dishes of pheasant, grouse and partridge with buttered baby turnips, carrots and spinach. We will eat them with fried breadcrumbs, bread sauce or sometimes roast them on a slice of bread. Potatoes come roasted in beef dripping or goose fat, or are sometimes mashed with hot milk and butter. If there are seconds I am first in the queue. Then there are the peripheral delicacies I love to pick at between meals. We both love cheese, and spend far too much on artisan cheddar, buttery blue cheeses or interesting little rounds of bloomy rinded cheeses made with ewes’ milk.

Feeding children brings the inevitable opportunity to snack on their six o’clock leftovers – a nibble of bread-crumbed fish here, a mouthful of pasta there. Sometimes we will order a takeaway of a few deliciously buttery curries, popadoms, bhajis and chapattis, and when the children have had their fill I will put away anything that is left on the table.

But it is not just the food. For as long as I can remember I have drunk a lot of wine. Not every night but most evenings I will get through a bottle, perhaps a bit more. Although this is way above the recommended daily intake I do not seem to suffer ill-effects, apart from being too fat. There is no diabetes, few bad hangovers, no greater loss of concentration, in fact nothing that would serve as a warning that I am drinking too much and I rarely wake full of remorse, cursing the night before.

My exercise consists of walking to the newsagent for a newspaper and, if I am smoking, a packet of fags. Rose also takes up and gives up smoking intermittently, but regularly runs round our local park. The fitter she has become the more frequently she asks when I will try to do something about my weight, or take a break from drinking so much. I have always had a good line ready when under attack: ‘I am putting a date in the diary,’ I will say. ‘After the wedding/birth-day/dinner/Christmas party’ – delete as appropriate. Exercise, if it is taken at all, has been both irregular and painful: the odd swim and game of tennis if the weather is nice. But both leave me feeling knackered and unable to move properly for days after. There was a game of football once with some friends in Battersea Park. We played against a group of young kids and after an hour we were so exhausted that we spent the rest of the afternoon in the pub and vowed never to play again.

My dad was forty-two when he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. As a young man he had been a smoker and drinker, but shortly after he became a father he gave up the fags, cut down on the booze, got fit and was enjoying life. When he was diagnosed he was in better shape than he had been as a teenager, but it was all too brief. When he was first diagnosed he spiralled into depression and retreated to bed to die. For six weeks he hardly moved, and in the end only got up when we stopped taking him food. He died nineteen years later.

Part of the reason why I have not stopped smoking or drinking is that neither of these things killed my dad. I have always possessed a nonsensical fear that if I follow his route to fitness and redemption the same fate might strike me. There was little logic to the reasoning, but it is a fact that the fitter you get the more you worry about your health. As a consequence, ever since I turned forty-two I have been waiting for some kind of diagnosis like the one given to my father. In the dark hours of my midlife crisis these are the thoughts that regularly haunt me.

While my brother was like my mum, I was always very much my father’s child. We had the same mop of hair and were of a similar temperament, and perhaps it is because of this that, daily, I convince myself that I have some life-threatening illness. Sometimes it’s knee cancer, sometimes throat, other times lung. I still remember when, aged eleven, I read in a Sunday supplement about a young girl who got cancer on the ball of her foot. I was convinced that was going to happen to me.

I was thirteen when my father was diagnosed, the same age my own son, Jack, is now, and it was around this time that the horse bug really took hold of me. It grabbed me by the throat: there’s nothing like the horse when you’re feeling down. I’d had the experience before when I was much younger, when we lived in Muswell Hill and not grotty Ealing, where we subsequently moved to. While my father was being eaten by his horrible disease I sought solace with the horse. I would tiptoe out of the house and take the train to the stables in Harefield where we kept a series of ponies, first Bracken and then Gambol. The journey from our suburban house in Ealing, which I hated, took over an hour, and the closer I got to the stables the more I felt I had got away from the suffering at home. I used to get the train to Ruislip and then walk the three miles to the stables. Sometimes Mum would drive me but, as I know now, ferrying children around to something you are uninterested in can be particularly soul-destroying. I would stay there long after dark, until the stable owner was closing up and only then, reluctantly, walk back to the station and wait for the last train home. Mum would occasionally feign an interest in riding. Once or twice she even had a couple of lessons, but they were really only taken to placate me.

During those first years I would do anything to be surrounded by horses. There is something untouchable and unknowable about them, and they were as magical to me as characters in my favourite children’s stories. When I was around them I was able to forget for a moment what was happening to my father. I loved stroking them, but I was just as happy watching them in the field, or observing them eat and drink.

It is now more than twenty years since I last rode a horse. We have two children. There are other distractions along with the duty of putting food on the table. But I have regrets, and the one I feel most keenly as I observe others who have been successful in one horse business or another is that, through a combination of fate and error, I never pursued that promised career in the equine world. More than that is the nagging reminder that I have never done the one thing I have always wanted to do – competed on a horse in a race, on a racecourse.

Since I was a teenager I have been drawn to horses, riding and the world of horse racing, but I have never ridden in any type of race. In those early years of hanging around ponies, drowning in their aroma, I never had the bottle, the skill or the bravery to put them, or myself, to the physical limits of both our capabilities. I competed in hunter trials and gymkhanas, and have a very old sackful of rosettes to prove it. I have a grand photo, too, of me and my dad in an equine fancy-dress competition. Dad is leading me on a white pony called, funnily enough, Prince. A tiny thing and perched on top of him is me in a fantastic outfit; I mean a really brilliant, clever outfit. I was dressed as a bottle of whisky and my dad held a banner aloft proclaiming ‘You can take a White Horse anywhere’, a play on the in vogue advert of the time for White Horse Scotch whisky. My mum had spent days designing and making the outfit. We won the show. Later on there was a bit of jumping, too, the higher the better, and even though my pony at the time, Bracken, was tiny, he would jump any obstacle put in his way. But as much fun as those riding days were, it was not quite the same as actually racing a horse. And this is what I have really always wanted to do.

There is one certainty about riding in a race and that is that you have to be a particular weight. A 16-stone man has never ridden in a horse race, let alone won one, even though I once suggested in the racing column I write for The Tablet that there should be horse races for fatties in which the jockeys have to have a minimum weight of 15 stone. In my daily, very urban life in London this is the closest I now get to living out my dream, and yet almost every day I am haunted by the lure of the horse. The pull remains infectious and the desire to ride returns time and again.

It was not just my weight and general listlessness that sparked the fire to get reunited with the animal I love most in the world. I have enjoyed a good living combining the worlds of journalism and television to follow what I love, but I am at a time in my life where I am feeling disappointed, somewhat unfulfilled. Middle age is upon me, and with it has come the crisis. I will not have many years left in which to fulfil a childhood dream. Time, therefore, to do something extraordinary – just once.

One evening after Christmas, Rose and I were finishing a bottle of wine and having a ‘big conversation’ about our lives. The usual discussion about how we both drink too much (we do) and how we should cut down (which we also do from time to time) was interspersed with the reality of my weight and general lack of fitness. I weigh four stone more than I should and I am only five foot ten. ‘If you won’t lose weight for me what would you do it for?’ she asked. And then the words came out of my mouth. I don’t know why and I can only guess that I had been meaning to say them for a very long time. ‘I’d lose weight to ride again.’ Rose thought I meant hacking through woodlands or having a steady canter along verdant green turf or practising the forgotten art of the rising trot. I could see she was entirely unimpressed. And then I said: ‘I’ll do it to ride in a race, on a proper racehorse on one of Britain’s racetracks.’ That stopped her in her stride. She thought it was a great idea and from that moment onwards for the next ten months I put every effort into pulling it off.

Chapter One

The basic arithmetic was simple. To become a jockey I needed to lose five stone, to get under the minimum allowance of 12 stone. Having never been on a diet of any sort in my life before, I had no idea how long it would take or how to do it, apart from the obvious things of not eating or drinking too much. But I assumed, not unnaturally, that it would probably take a hell of a long time. If I could lose half a stone a month then by September I would have lost enough weight to be ready to race. But before I could establish when to race and how to diet, there was the question of how I could teach myself not to eat so much when surrounded by people who spend a good deal of time shopping and cooking mountains of food.

The first thing that had to be cut out was bread and pasta and butter and cheese. I remember my mother, who claimed constantly to be on a diet, saying years ago that she did the same thing. There was no precise science involved to suggest that this was the best way to proceed, but it felt like the right place to begin. The day after my announcement, Rose and I worked through what I might be able to eat and how it would fit in with what we would both still enjoy eating, since she had decided to take on the diet as well. It was not easy. We haggled and bickered and then discussed it all before reaching a compromise of sorts.

The conundrum of the diet was that since all athletes – footballers, boxers and rugby players among others – take a huge amount of carbohydrates on board, pasta and the like was a natural part of their daily intake. If I was going to be exercising for the first time in more than twenty years and put unfamiliar pressure on my body, carbohydrates would be essential for refuelling. But I wasn’t an athlete and, besides, jockeys ate virtually nothing. Where was the middle ground? We decided that, rather than simply starve four stone off my body, we would start with a diet of pulses, beans, lentils – protein – lots of vegetables, salads and fruit, and wait and see what happened. The hardest part was the wine, which had been a part of my daily life since I got my first job, but that too was struck off the list, and then put back on, before being taken off again, and finally being allowed – in moderation.

Next on the list of things to do was to call everyone I knew in the horse world – trainers, owners, agents and managers – to find out what chance I had of riding a horse on a proper racecourse. No one took me seriously. Most people said it was a mad idea and that I would soon come to my senses. Others said that there was a good probability of me killing myself. The rest just howled with laughter. But then, when I said that I really was going to do it and that no one was going to stop me, the tone changed, and I started to get the advice I needed.

What was immediately apparent was that before I could go anywhere near a horse I needed to get fit and to lose a lot of weight. Until I had done that no one was going to let me ride. Quite apart from the fact that a Thoroughbred racehorse is a very delicate creature, the dangers of falling off one are exacerbated when you are overweight. The extra pounds make riding a horse a tricky balancing act, and if you do fall off with an extra four stone of ballast pushing down on you as you connect with the ground, broken bones are inevitable. I was told to watch footage of the greatest jockeys, men like Lester Piggott and Frankie Dettori, to see how their remarkable balance and rhythm did not upset the horse’s natural gait. If the horse is put off its stride it will lose valuable ground. As I watched old tapes of their famous victories I clutched my girth and laughed to myself as I thought that this was what I was hoping, in my own way, to emulate. But I had to start somewhere.

If there was one real concern, though, it was that the pursuit of a childhood dream, in itself, was worryingly selfish, since this was all about the urge to pursue a dream that had been gnawing away at me for years. It would mean cutting myself off from my wife and children for weeks at a time as I disappeared to the countryside to train. It would mean a disruption, not just to our everyday diet but also to the children’s wellbeing, and our family life. It left me with the nagging question that I should be have been concentrating on being a responsible father. Others who had faced a midlife crisis had just gone out and bought a Porsche. Why, some asked, couldn’t I just go off and do that? On the other hand, I reasoned with myself, hadn’t the children for years thought that they had a rather eccentric fat bloke for a father, who just ate too much? For as long as they could remember they only ever saw me with a glass of wine in my hand. Surely I could do better than that? This, then, would be a new era, a challenge the like of which I had not had for years, certainly not within their lifetime.

For as long as I can remember breakfast has usually consisted of a few slices of toast with marmalade, perhaps a fried egg or a couple of rashers of bacon. Occasionally I would have a Stockbridge sausage or two, all washed down with a mug of tea with full-fat milk. What I would now be presented with at the start of each day was a breakfast truly fit for a horse. Every evening I would prepare a meal of deliciously malted crushed barley, oats, linseed and a dessert spoon of honey all soaked overnight in water. It was a cold porridge-style gruel, which was not much to look at, but was far from unpleasant, and very early on it became the highlight of my day. This was supplemented by a strong cup of Earl Grey, with skimmed milk. Without doubt the best Earl Grey available is Fairtrade tea bags sold by the Co-op. It used to be that Safeways was the best but that particular enterprise folded into Morrisons and they foolishly did away with the tea. The breakfast felt healthy, and almost immediately I could feel the difference as I digested the food quickly, and it left me buzzing with a new energy. Within days I felt better than I had in years.

Whereas before lunch constituted grazing over delicious leftovers with a glass of wine (permanently topped up), it now became a meal consisting of salad with a piece of fish or cold chicken. White beans with olive oil, thyme and tuna was another favourite; it is so good that it has become a household speciality, with which I serve up pots of tiny brown Puy lentils with finely chopped celery, onions and carrots cooked for 20–25 minutes in chicken stock. To cook the lentils, first I fried the vegetables in olive oil, then added the lentils, stirring vigorously for 2–3 minutes and then finally the chicken stock. It was a warming, intense experience and it kept the bowels open. Dinner was taken after a walk with Billy, our dog, and would generally consist of more of the lentils cooked earlier in the day, a piece of steak and a salad.

To supplement these home-made concoctions I drank between five and seven litres of water a day. This was far more than is recommended, but I stuck to it religiously in the perhaps misplaced belief that it would help flush out the fat. I kept litre bottles of water at my desk, in the car, in bed – anywhere I knew I would be for more than a few minutes. Inevitably it led me to think that I might develop another phantom ailment – this time diabetes.

For the first few weeks I deliberately stayed away from the scales, anticipating the excitement of shedding the first few pounds. I felt better, cleaner somehow and more alive but also still lumpen. When I stepped onto the scales for the first time, filled with the excitement of having achieved something special, absolutely nothing had changed. The bathroom scales just crept up to the 16 stone 7lb mark, and did the same every time I got on them. More drastic measures needed to be taken. I returned to the diet list and crossed out the drink again, vowing to give it up for five days of the week. That way I could reward myself at the weekends. For the time being, I would continue to smoke but also tried to cut back on cigarettes, too. Not that I am sure it made any difference, but it felt like the right thing to do.