Spotted together in Abu Dhabi last week were Charles Barnett and Stephen Wallis, the bosses of Ascot and Newmarket respectively. The two key venues of Flat racing are working together as never before and hope persists that they will produce a more compelling climax to the British season.

Their proposal, revealed in The Times last month, is for alternate staging of a mid-September meeting combining the autumn jewels of both courses in a card packed with group one races.

Senior executives at the British Horseracing Authority have now expressed enthusiasm but it needs more co-ordinated industry support than that to get the scheme off the ground.

Newmarket's Champions Day on Saturday will once more suffer from its proximity to the Breeders' Cup. The Champion Stakes is a modest contest, New Approach apart, and Wallis admits that a crowd of 10,000 would be satisfactory. “Everyone is saying we need a better end to the season,” Wallis said.

“We've come up with a mechanism that could lead to people not talking up the Arc and the Breeders' Cup but the best of British. The feedback we are getting on our travels is that Britain lacks something of an international platform. Our proposal could help remedy that.”

Wallis has more immediate concerns with news that Newmarket's crowds, apart from its phenomenal music nights, have fallen 10 per cent this year. “The leisure pound is always the first to contract when times are hard,” he said. “We are looking at ways to address that.”

As racing prepares to face its own bleak uncertainties within an economic recession, demands for pay rises may seem unrealistic. Jockeys remain optimistic, though, that they will be better rewarded from next year. One meeting with the racehorse owners, who pay the bills, has already passed off without feathers flying and a second is planned for early next month.

Josh Apiafi, the energetic chief executive of the Professional Jockeys' Association, is keen to dispel the impression that the process is all about trying to make the star jockeys still richer. “We understand the difficult economic climate,” Apiafi said. “But jockeys should not be subsidising the rest of the industry. Our main aim in this is to ensure that the average jockey can earn the average British salary of £24,000. At present, too many are below that figure.”

Irish racing has long been regarded with envy in Britain because of its high level of government support. Imagine the consternation, then, over budget decisions to impose a near 10 per cent cut in direct contributions and to double betting tax.

In the short term, according to Horse Racing Ireland, the moves must jeopardise the massive and overdue redevelopment of the Curragh. As winter approaches, the Irish cannot even console themselves with the prospect of bullying the British at the big jumps meetings - Paul Nicholls has personally put paid to all that.

Today, though, there will at least be a warm air of nostalgia at Punchestown, where the last two Irish-trained winners of the Gold Cup, Kicking King and War Of Attrition, meet in a race that should tell us plenty about their chances of restoring past glories.

Unsurprising betting stories this week: (1) The sale of the Tote has been delayed again and the new Super7 bet is already under review. (2) Betfair signed on its two-millionth client, only 20 months after registering one million.

Pool betting, mired in ownership issues, is sinking in the backwash of the exchange supertanker. Like it or not, Betfair is a modern phenomenon, its most sobering statistic the figure of five million transactions a day - more than all of Europe's stock exchanges combined.

Reasons to be cheerful, part one ... Many of us would like a seat at the Park Lane Hotel tonight, where the cabaret at the Spinal Research James Bond Charity Ball consists of sports celebrities walking down the catwalk with the Bond girls of celluloid legend. Johnno Spence, the larger-than-life marketing man, had the onerous task of recruiting volunteers for the show. Racing, thankfully, has its hero in the spotlights and Sam Thomas, the Gold Cup-winning jockey, needed scant persuasion to don his black tie.

Reasons to be cheerful, part two ... Christmas may be a shade more Scrooge-like this year but £30 is not a bad price to pay for the best book of racing photographs I have seen. In The Frame, by the engagingly obsessive Edward Whitaker, portrays a racing year in some memorably offbeat pictures.

Personal favourites are Thunder Sky at Cartmel and Silhouettes at Ascot. It is made for the coffee table.