THE memories jostle each other, unwilling to be cast aside like a child’s once-favourite toy. Pat coming fast and late on Dancing Brave in the Arc, Pat trying to nurse El Gran Senor home in the Epsom Derby, Pat talking the very Christian and ultra-correct Steve Cauthen into a game of poker on a flight back from Cyprus, then travelling the length and breadth of Britain, looking to deny him the title in 1987.

It all but burst the pair of them but captivated an audience well outside racing’s sometimes narrow confines, like Piggott and Breasley all those years ago.

And then there was Pat gradually coming to grips with the media, that endearing way he had of pronouncing ‘they’ as ‘dey’, maybe going all the way back to his Newbridge childhood.

Sometimes he’d come out with a dead-pan one-liner, such as pointing out that he was always bang on time on the gallops, ‘though you’d be first anyway if you were riding work for Neville Callaghan’.

How we cherished those dry asides, normally reserved for his weigh-room colleagues. It wasn’t that he disliked the press or the battery of cameras and microphones, it was just that, like Piggott, he simply and genuinely didn’t understand what all the fuss was about.

You went out and did your job; if you did it well you attracted the attention of the best trainers, and once you’d achieved that you were certain to ride the best horses, which he did for many years.

Now that he’s gone, tragically early, the mental pictures are even more vivid.

All of Dick Hern’s meticulous planning, with two pacemakers to assist Bustino and thereby run the finish out of Grundy in the King George, came to nothing as Pat, with perfect timing, loomed up on his outer and delivered the killer thrust close home.

It was a gentler time and Hern paid for Peter Walwyn’s new suit, the bet having been struck in the days leading up to the race.

It comes as a blow to the heart to realise that the jockey who made it all possible has departed the stage only a few short weeks after the legendary commentator who called him home.

Pat Eddery was a great jockey, of that there is no doubt. Like many outstanding talents, he was not only deeply respected in the weigh-room, he was copied. If Pat thought the ground at Salisbury was soft enough to come stands’ side, everyone else thought so, too.

Above all, he was a superb horseman - something the shrewdest judges notice very quickly.

When he started attracting attention on Major Michael Pope’s Alvaro, who set up a remarkable winning sequence in 1969, another trainer took a dim view of the young apprentice’s effort in a minor race, claiming that he’d dropped his hands. “Well, you’d better get out there and pick them up, then, because they’re the best pair you’re ever likely to see”, Pope replied.

Like Piggott, Pat wasn’t all that interested in criticism, though it had nothing to do with arrogance. Many thought he should have rousted El Gran Senor at Epsom as Christy Roche gave his best impression of a whirling dervish alongside him on Secreto.

For a while he said nothing but later, in a rare moment of public candour, he said: “Dey don’t understand. Epsom is a much stiffer course than people realise and this horse barely gets a mile and a half. He’ll be happier at the Curragh”. El Gran Senor went on to win easily, of course.

Pat was never going to make it as a trainer. These days the most important races are concentrated in relatively few hands and he was too good, too much of a perfectionist, to be training a series of syndicate horses for Chepstow and Brighton handicaps.

There were family problems and then alcohol, a fickle, dangerous ally, began to compensate for having the guts kicked out of his raison d’etre. It Pat couldn’t ride top-class horses, the days must have seemed long indeed.

His passing has affected everyone, with no tribute more poignant than that of his friend Willie Carson, no longer the cheeky chappie of yore but a man with a keener sense of time’s implacable arrow.

A few years ago there was this wonderful picture of the pair of them, backs to camera, leaning on a paddock fence as a bunch of mares skittered around.

Happy as sandboys, they looked for all the world like two urchins on the threshold of a dream. Well, they both lived the dream for a good long time and now one of them has gone.

But Pat Eddery leaves us with a rich seam of memories; dare we say it, many, many more than most of those who go on to complete the proverbial good innings. God bless, Pat.