'I found escapism but also an awful lot of trouble in the bottle'

“I didn’t feel good,” Oisin Murphy says with a grimace as he gestures towards the birthday cards still standing in his house more than a month since he turned 30.

- Donald McRae

Murphy has already spoken for an hour, in raw and moving detail, about the guilt he will feel when he has to walk down a guard of honour to mark his fifth champion jockeys' title at Ascot, his daily struggle with alcoholism, his near catastrophic return to drinking this summer, the dangers of racing and the Sylvia Plath poem he loves most.

But the milestone of his 30th birthday troubles him. “It was incredibly significant because I never thought I'd get to 30,” Murphy says, as he uses a smouldering cigarillo to light another in an unbroken chain stretching across this corner of Lambourn.

They call it the Valley of the Racehorse and, on a Monday morning, mist hangs over the village - in the same way that Murphy is enveloped in a cloud of smoke. “I never had any plans past 30,” he says amid a fresh puff.

Did he think he would die before then? “It wasn’t quite that morbid but all the time you have targets: 'I want to win this race, I want to win this championship, I want my own house.' I never made any targets past 30.

“That’s another thing getting to 30. Lots of people are in serious relationships and beginning to have children. Maybe I’m selfish. I was in a very serious relationship with a beautiful girl and a lovely person, Elizabeth Nielsen. That ended at the beginning of this year, but we're still very good friends. We still speak almost every day. Most of my ex-girlfriends I’ve remained friendly with, which is great. I never feel like the reason those relationships ceased was because of them. It was because of me.” Is he close to finding new targets for himself? “It’s very different now. Every day I have to work at being sober and it’s going well. But I've had good periods in the past …”