I could see I’d be going back to leading the horses round for other people – I wasn’t going to get any farther – so I left racing.”That win at Wolverhampton, beating Ray Cochrane and Frankie, was the real highlight, but I also rode a winner at 85-1 in a big cup race at Ellerslie in Auckland America’s Cup, it was called It was 13th out of 13 in the betting, the rank outsider. I rode 10 winners and then I got a phone call telling me my dad had passed away.”It was a terrible shock, and I came back home and went to work for Lady Herries at Littlehampton in West Sussex She was brilliant She gave me 10 rides. “I rode the horses in training there and I was so competitive I had to win every time on the gallops,” she recalled. “Mr Dunlop said it was very difficult to become a female jockey in England and a lot of people told me there were more equal opportunities in New Zealand, so I went out there when I was 19 I had a fantastic time.

Riding for Lady Anne Herries, she guided Aitch ‘N Bee to victory at 10-1 – ahead of Ray Cochrane on Pillow Talk and Frankie Dettori on the 6-1 shot Rockstine. “It wasn’t such a significant race to Frankie,” she reflected, sipping her lime and soda, “but to me it was the highlight of my whole career.”At 34, Crombie-Hicks, a 5ft 2in, 7st 7lb bundle of hyperactivity, is about to embark on a career as an international athlete, thanks to her run in the Berlin Marathon two months ago, when she placed sixth in a women’s section won by the Olympic champion, Mizuki Noguchi, bettering the Scottish Commonwealth selection standard with a time of 2hr 38min 42sec.Born in Aberdeen and raised in Portsmouth, her first sporting career started some time after she joined John Dunlop’s stable in Arundel at the age of 16. It will not be her first experience of ?te-class sporting action.
Back on 4 January 1995, as plain Shona Crombie, she rode the winner in the 3.30 at Wolverhampton, the Ash Handicap. Last week she was picked to represent her native Scotland at the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne.

On 19 March she runs in the women’s marathon, which starts and finishes at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. “It’s only £1.65.”

Dressed in her training gear, and fresh from her morning run around the paths and fields of Bourton – with its low stone bridges and its gentle-flowing, tree-shaded River Windrush, known as “the Venice of the Cotswolds” – Crombie-Hicks was contemplating a trip of her own. “Catch the Pulham’s coach on the way back,” the multi-gifted sportswoman and part-time Pulham’s secretary advised. So, apart from the fact that it’s lob- sters rather than fish, and concrete rather than steel, and in Oban rather than on the east coast, I got it dead right Nineteen years later.. In the Rose Tree restaurant, with its adornment of horse-racing pictures, it was only fitting that Shona Crombie-Hicks should proffer a tip. The taxi ride from the train station in Cheltenham to the Cotswold idyll of Bourton-on-the-Water had cost a perpendicularly steep £30.

Professor William Ritchie, the director of the Aberdeen Institute for Coastal Science and Management, said: “In years to come, we will see artificial reefs emerging around the coast of Britain.”The reef’s biggest attraction, it seems, is for lobster “ranching”, where juveniles are planted on the reefs and then grow to eating size. Made with 10,000 tonnes of honeycombed concrete blocks, the reef has seen sea life increase 16 times in the area since 2002, with cod, lobster and other shellfish moving in.The Scottish Association for Marine Science, who are behind the project, are planning a similar reef off Aberdeen. The scheme had worked in Florida, so why not in the UK?Journalists, alas, have a low attention span. I forgot all about it until this week, when I read that an artificial reef in Loch Linnhe, near Oban, had been so successful that others were planned.

Then bigger things that eat the small ones (on land, they’d be called lawyers) would turn up Within a few years, you’d have a thriving underwater town. It would provide commercial and rod-and-line fishing, with the local town policing its reef and stopping the dastardly Spaniards or Russians from nobbling the fish. Too expensive, and all that steel would depress the domestic market.Eric’s answer was to sink them a few miles off the ailing ports and turn them into fish-attracting reefs. Unlike cars, which rot to nothing in a few years, high-grade steel lasts a century or more.Within a short time, small sea creatures would populate the reef. This chap in Aberdeen, Eric something, was pushing the idea that discarded oil rigs could be the salvation of struggling fishing communities.