It’s owned by a man in his early thirties who makes a very comfortable living from backing racehorses.Each day, Mark wakes up at 6.15am and pours over form books and the racing press, piecing together which horse is best to back. Cream carpets, butter-yellow walls, a new three-piece suite and teak veneer tables. Holding him up round the final bend, he edges him through the field to lead at the last hurdle. He hits the front, goes two lengths clear, idles slightly, and is pushed out to win by a neck Mark’s expression doesn’t waver. He ambles over to the bookmaker, who reluctantly scratches around in his satchel and pays him in crumpled notes. A bespectacled man in a turquoise windcheater pulls me aside: “You’re with Mark today, are you?” he asks in a hushed voice “What a guy, what a life He’s stuffed the bookies more times than I can mention Winning for him is like taking candy from a baby. He’s a legend.”
Mark lives with his wife, Louise, and two-year-old son, James, in a detached house in a quiet middle-class suburb of Bristol Inside everything is immaculate.

In the far corner of the ring Mark Holder starts fumbling about in a creased envelope stuffed full of pounds 50 notes. Immaculately dressed in a black cashmere jacket and grey trousers, he is a little under six foot with caramel brown skin and dark hair, flecked with grey. He approaches a bookmaker and places a thick slice of the folded fifties on a horse called Santella Boy His voice doesn’t falter He could have been ordering a cup of tea

Santella Boy’s jockey gives the horse a beautiful ride. “Try telling your brain it’s not real” is the catchphrase attached to much of Segaworld’s publicity. It’s a motto that will stand just as well for the clamorous, arousing, sleeve-tugging world at large.Outings, page 13. In the betting ring at Exeter racecourse, the bookmakers are furiously compiling the odds for the fifth race – The Westrucks for Scania Handicap Hurdle over two miles and six furlongs.

So Bertolucci too is doing his bit to re- engineer the sensorium, that package of messages that makes up our felt experience.I would guess that it’s being re-engineered in the direction of diminished sensitivity. And though this experience is not necessarily superior to that offered by a novel, it is physiologically different. The stimulus isn’t reconstructed to your own specifications from verbal code, it is there before you, working directly on that outpost of the brain called the eye. Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty, for example, offers male viewers (and maybe some women too) a pretty effective simulation of a summer crush.