The idea of reproducing, in an arena like the Circus Maximus, a race between half a dozen highly-tuned quadricas (the observant among you will have spotted Boadicea driving one with four fresh-looking animals across the top of Hyde Park Corner) was a well-formed fantasy of mine in my foolish, romantic 20s. Evidently, German impresario Franz Abraham has not grown out of his version of this fantasy. He claims to have staked his all on the realisation of his dream, Ben Hur Live at the O2 Arena; if it’s a flop, he’s said, he’ll be ruined. Poor old Franz. After reading the reviews and seeing some clips of the show on the net, it looks to me as if ruination could well be on the cards. After all, it’s reported that the ‘chariot race’ -  the apogee of the whole show, surely – lasts a mere two minutes – not long enough to deliver satisfaction of any sort.

   If only Franz had sought to work out his fantasies in a more manageable way, like the surprisingly adventurous Lord (David) Lipsey, who despite his credentials as an economist, financial journalist and adviser to the Labour government, has seen the fulfilment of his equine dreams by owning and driving his own trotting horses, and, much to the amazement of the Welsh trotting folk who sold them to him, winning with them.

Driving trotters (or “pacers”) from a flimsy sulky, as practised in mid Wales and the Marches, is (I’m told) a seriously gut-churning experience and, even without Charlton Heston to whip it up, provides as exciting a spectator sport as you could see in any public arena, which, without the spinning axle blades to slice an opponents’ spokes, has it over Roman chariot racing as far as our Health & Safety minders are concerned.

I love the trotters, and persuaded my friends, John & Carol Challis that they too should experience the rough and tumble of the Mid-Wales and Border Counties Trotting Association – an organisation with a pleasingly slender rule book (unlike their more fastidious cousins, the British Harness Racing Club). Given John’s alter ego, since 1981, as Boycie in Only Fools and Horses, he risked the tabloid headline, “Boycie visits the Trotters” but agreed to traipse across country to the Bell in Almeley, west Herefordshire, where we met Ray Thomas, landlord of the Lion Hotel in Llanbister, builder, farmer, horseman, traveller and polymath, who had a runner in the pre-novice race and whom I’d asked to mark our card for the day. He led us off to a nearby field in which a few Portaloos and a beer tent had been erected for the races. A course was laid out with sporadic wood posts and lengths of rope. A flat bed trailer by the winning post accommodated the judges and the commentator. A race card offered the runners and rivers for a dozen or so trials of speed.

Trotting is not a traditonal activity of the tweed-and-Barbour Range-Roving classes; it is run and watched by unsophisticated, sturdy Celtic folk – skilled, tough and canny they are too, though not always as canny as the bookies that come out to take their money each week. Neither the bookies nor the punters, though, can ever be sure who’s trying to do what, and both rely on assessing the whiteness of the knuckles of the drivers of the runners-up in the earlier heats, so as to know how to skew the odds in the finals.

A lot of the punters, it turned out, were also fans of Only Fools and Horses, and John was asked ceremoniously to leave his imprimatur (or, at least, Boycie’s) on the bar of the beer tent that does the rounds of the border trotting meetings.

There’ll never be trotting at the O2 Arena, thank God, and with luck it will remain our Marcher country speciality for some time. The season’s more or less over now, but if you’d like to see some real, live chariot racing, make a note that the premier meeting of the year takes place at Pen-y-Bont in Powys, over a wonderful, ramshackle course, complete with clapboard Grandstand and known as the Wembley of the West, on the first Wednesday of August. You won’t need your Ascot hat, but you’ll see as much sport.

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