THIS is your culinary report, brought to you by Patrick Mullins.

“I had to put spaghetti back into the pot last night for another five minutes. It wasn’t cooked enough.”

So, it seems, domestic bliss with his partner Sara Rose and their now 18-month old daughter Wynter, has not elicited any improvement from his many years living with Brian Hayes and Rachael Blackmore.

It is a rare failure on the part of Jackie and Willie Mullins, but perfection eludes us all.

It was Blackmore who lifted the lid on Mullins Jnr’s haplessness in the kitchen, during a video montage played to mark the 36-year-old securing HRI’s National Hunt Achievement Award in recognition of winning the Grand National on Nick Rockett.

“I had chips in the oven and I just shouted down the stairs, ‘Turn the chips there in the oven,” Blackmore detailed. “So I came downstairs 10 or 15 minutes later, and he had just rotated the tray from horizontal to landscape.

“Another day he was making scrambled eggs, delighted with himself. You know, this is the height of his cooking. But I’ll just never forget, he kind of turned to me as he was mixing, lifted up the spatula, and the spatula was plastic and had completely bent, like Free Willy.

“So yeah, leaves a bit to be desired.”

He chuckles now, in the weighing room at Catterick Racecourse, and repeats an age-old male mantra.

“Daragh, if you don’t want a job, don’t be good at it.”

Clearly, his desire to be effective in the saddle is at the opposite end of this spectrum, as evidenced by the 900 plus winners, the 17 champion amateur titles, the record for an amateur in a single season of 74.

The 27 Grade 1 triumphs, only nine of which came in bumpers. The Aintree Bowl, the Matheson Hurdle, the John Durkan Chase, the Morgiana Hurdle, the Faugheen Chase. The Galway Hurdle, the Topham.

And the National.

All achieved despite standing at 6’2’’, the same height as one of the pre-eminent basketballers of all time, Steph Curry. Perhaps the frailties over the stove have something to do with not being able to eat a whole lot.

To last this long with such a Spartan lifestyle, even allowing for the calibre of animal he has at his disposal at Closutton, where he is assistant trainer to his father, speaks to a steel that is cloaked by easy amiability.

“I suppose I admired him many years ago when he made smithereens of his collarbone, and he rode about five or six days later,” mused Ruby Walsh in that HRI video. “That was the day I knew he was a real jockey.”

Records smashed

The awards night was enjoyable, especially being presented with his gong by racing’s previous dominant amateur, Ted Walsh – father of Ruby - whose many records he has smashed, and who was so effusive in his praise.

Mullins did think there was a more deserving winner, though he was never going to do a Brando on it.

“With the video, I was wondering if someone retired me without telling me or something,” he says joking.

“No, it was lovely. But I thought Keith Donoghue should have gotten it for winning the Pardubicka (with the Gavin Cromwell-trained Stumptown)… Someone wins the National every year, whereas Keith is the first Irish jockey to win that. I just thought that was an extraordinary achievement, but anyway, we won’t give it back.”

He was always in thrall to the Aintree centrepiece. In an interview I did with him and his cousins Emmet, Danny and David for the Irish Racing Yearbook three years ago, he made no bones about how it was top of the pile.

“It’s the National definitely (over the Gold Cup). You’d read about Red Rum and Crisp, all the different stories. You’d name more National winners from 50 years ago than you would Gold Cup winners,” he said at the time.

It was that way for him long before he knew that the National transcended racing. Before he knew that winning it would bring a level of recognition no other National Hunt race could.

Visiting Rummy’s grave as a child and walking the course with his father left an indelible imprint but so did the countless narratives, legendary names: Caughoo and Golden Miller, Foinavon and Devon Loch.

As James Loughlin, his long-time school friend revealed, he had to make his escape via a first-floor window to get to Hedgehunter’s National in 2005, the getaway car awaiting to bring him to Dublin airport. He then evaded security to greet Ruby and the gelding on the track.

Pantheon

Exactly 20 years after his version of the great escape, and just a day after propelling the notably quirky Gaelic Warrior to victory in the Bowl, a feat extolled by Walsh Snr as “the ride of all rides,” he joined the Pantheon.

“Yeah, it was my dream,” he says now. “It was always my dream, rather than the Gold Cup... When I moved into the house of Brian and Rachael, we each had a picture on the wall. Rachael’s was two of her point-to-point winners, and Brian’s one of his early winners. And my picture was just my ride in the National with Dooney’s Gate, a picture of me going down to the start.

Aintree in 2019: The photo contains four Grand National wining riders, Paul Townend, Danny Mullins, David Mullins, Rachael Blackmore, Patrick Mullins and Jonathan Burke have a seat on The Chair after walking the grand national course \ Healy Racing

“It’s funny. We were in the pub celebrating later in the week. You had myself, Rachael Blackmore, Paul Townend, David Mullins and Emmet Mullins, five National winners there in the pub, which is so different than, say, my father’s generation, when there was no Irish National winner for 25 years.

“I can see all the black and white pictures, and I read all the books. I read about Red Rum. I remember meeting Ginger McCain in Aintree that year we went to the grave. And Willie said to me, ‘Now, here’s the man who trained Red Rum. You can ask him all the questions you’re always asking me,’ and sure I couldn’t think of anything to ask him, I was starstruck.

“But, even the fences – Becher’s Brook and Foinavon, they have a name because of a story that happened, whereas no other race has that breadth of history behind it.”

That awareness of the history remains and is primarily why he is still doing this, a month after celebrating his 36th birthday, 20 years after getting legged up for the first time in public in a Thurles bumper on Screaming Witness, 19 and a half years after registering his first winner on Diego Garcia in Limerick.

Certainly, Mullins possesses far more imagination than Alexander the Great, who apparently cried because there were no more worlds left for him to conquer.

“I have to have something to aim for. Some people can take it day by day, but I need something to look at in the distance, something to aim for, and whether that’s beating a record, or whether it’s winning something I haven’t won, or whether it’s trying to win at all the tracks in England. That’s how I stay motivated.”

Unconquered land

He has 25 of the 42 to go cross-channel and though the Catterick box is already ticked, he has travelled there to steer Clay Pigeons to victory because the British amateur jockeys’ championship is another unconquered land for an Irish-based raider.

“I thought I might have a squeak last year but Alex Chadwick set one of the highest totals in something like 15 years (23 to Mullins’ 14). Hopefully, we might get that one too.”

According to the Greco-Roman philosopher, historian and biographer Plutarch, Alexander’s relationship with his father, Philip, forged the competitive side of his personality. Not drawing any parallels but obviously, the apple did not fall far from the tree with the younger Mullins when it came to an enduring appetite for success.

Just when you think he has done it all, Willie goes and trains a Breeders’ Cup winner. He is desperate to add the Melbourne Cup and has harboured the dream of lifting the Ascot Gold Cup.

And in his natural habitat, going three-in-a-row as British trainers’ champions is an idea that absolutely appeals to him. He will be 70 on his next birthday.

“I’m always amazed at Willie’s hunger and his ambition, at his age. I look at a lot of my friends’ fathers, and they’re retired. They’re different people than Willie. That’s the drive, the energy that he has every day. He loves it. I think for him to be swimming in the same waters as Vincent O’Brien, Tom Dreaper, people I would have heard him speaking about growing up, I think that’s very special for him.”

Loves the game

What is notable is how much Willie still enjoys winning. And celebrates, on and off the track.

“He just genuinely loves the game. It’s not a job. And he doesn’t get too low. I’ve never seen him get too low, but, as you say, he enjoys a good day. And that’s probably what’s kept him going for as long. He hasn’t lost that love for it.”

Their relationship is not a tactile one, with regular professions of affection.

“Willie is an old-fashioned man in that regard. But you look at his father, (another legendary trainer, Paddy), who would have been very quiet, wouldn’t have said much. I mean, I definitely won a Galway Hurdle and a John Durkan and I don’t think we talked about it at all. It was never mentioned. I think he might have asked me why I got ‘bet’ in the bumper the day I won the Galway Hurdle! That’s just the way he is. And that’s just the way it was. I would say most of the uncles are the same. So with the cousins, we weren’t looking at anyone else thinking anyone was acting any different! So, it probably stems from my grandfather, I’d imagine.”

All of which made the reaction after the Grand National triumph so staggering. For all that he has appreciated the long line of accomplishments, no one ever saw a teary-eyed Willie Mullins choking up, battling to control his emotions.

“That, to me, was what made the whole thing, I think. And for a lot of people. You could see what it meant, what the Grand National means. I think you could say that in Willie’s position, you know, you could have seen him reacting very differently. And that he didn’t is the mark of the race and the man, I suppose.”

He is a dad himself now and concedes that while it is “the wrong answer,” not much in his life has changed. Ever the forward planner and historian, he is already contemplating which of the mares he has at home, out of Screaming Witness, will provide Wynter with her first racecourse ride in 15 years’ time.

Over the years, his role in the training operation has expanded but while the brains trust, of which he is a key part along with David Casey and Ruby Walsh, is crucial, there is no question as to who makes the final decision.

And though Willie loves his weather station at the gallops, the appliance of science will never overtake the evidence of his eyes and ears, and how the internal circuit boards compute all the information taken in.

“Willie has his ways. It is amazing. I’m always waiting for someone to come and transform the way it’s done, but it hasn’t happened yet.

“We have a system. We have a routine. We have our gallops. We have our horse care, and the way we do it and I suppose it works. Now, he does chip and change different things, but he’s always drummed into me that, (it’s) the eye. You have to see the horses every day. You have to listen to the feedback of your riders.

“It’s funny. I was at a dinner recently with (Ireland rugby head coach) Andy Farrell, and I was just telling a story about Impaire Et Passe last Christmas. Amy Morrissey, who rides him out every day, said about a week before Christmas, she just wasn’t happy with him. ‘I can’t tell you what it is, but he’s not himself.’

“So, we had his bloods taken, we scoped him, weighed him. Myself and Ruby go up on him and everything was fine, but Amy said, ‘I’m not happy with him,’ and we backed off him for that week rather than work on him. And he won. And a lot of our horses last Christmas didn’t run well.

New rider

“And State Man (who ran a stinker too in the December Hurdle). His constant rider, Sinéad Walsh, had emigrated to Australia about a month before Christmas, and he had a new rider on. Everything was fine, we would have said. But I wonder if Sinéad was there, would she have said the same as Amy, would we back off with State Man and would he have ran well?

“But I was telling the story to Andy Farrell. He says, ‘I love that. I’m gonna tell that my team tomorrow, because rugby has gone so far towards stats, machines and numbers. And’ he says, ‘at the end of the day, you need to have the people on the ground that know the people,’ or know the animals in our case.”

Mullins has never shied away from how the stunning, constant flow of success crafted by Closutton for its owners is viewed by many externally. Just how you provide more opportunities to others without punishing those that have done it better than anyone else is the conundrum.

“It is interesting but I think Gavin Cromwell has obviously come up in that environment and done well. John Ryan is a man I would look to, (buying) cheap horses and always in the top 10, lots of winners and lots of prize money.

“Willie always talks about Whither Or Which as the horse who defined when he became a trainer and not a trader? And nowadays, this point-to-point industry has become so big that there’s lots of very good trainers that are just staying as traders.

“I would say Colin Bowe, the Doyles, the Fogartys, Sam Curling, are all good enough to be top 10 track trainers. And they’re not. They’re staying in point-to-points and then selling their horses to the top trainers, which contributes to the biggest people having the best horses,

“Now they’re entitled to do that, of course, but that is something I always wonder about as a big factor.

“It is very difficult. It’s very hard. I don’t envy anyone trying to start training now. I don’t have the answer but it’s not easy. There’s no doubt about that.”

Nothing worthwhile ever is. So onward he goes.