Who am I? Why do I do what I do? What do I intend to achieve over the next few years?

If you know the answer to any of these questions, please let me know – it would be great to find out. If you happen to know where I live, perhaps you could deliver me home too? I’m sure my family will be grateful.

As it happens, the British Horseracing Authority is asking the same set of questions about our sport. Not the one about where they live, because we all know their head office is at 75 High Holborn, but the other ones: who are we as a sporting collective? What are our values? What do we want to achieve?

It would be easy to dismiss the project, entitled ‘Racing Futures’, as navel-gazing or marketing humbug. But one of the sport’s drawbacks is that its supporters are so passionate, and so focused on the prizes we have marked out for ourselves, we tend to spend most of our time disagreeing about the minutiae and not enough considering how we present ourselves to the wider world. The objective is to establish a collective purpose, to develop a succinct and easily understood message that explains who we are and what we’re trying to do.

And it is important, because we live in a world that is changing, where pastimes which once resonated throughout society no longer seem quite so relevant. Take shopping for example: where once the majority of the population would take an obligatory stroll down a High Street packed full of diverse emporia, now we consult our telephones and order whatever we need online.

In a developed world which has become dangerously detached from the countryside, a tiny percentage of the population has daily contact with horses. A hundred years ago it would be likely that you’d see a horse every day, certainly pass one in the High Street whilst doing your shopping – probably even touch one, ride one or ride in a vehicle that was pulled by one. Racing horses would have seemed an obvious leisure pursuit. Now though, we need to give people a reason.

So this week I accepted an invitation to meet two ingenious and highly-respected consultants, Richard Hytner and Inken Dachse, who have been commissioned to help with the project. Former colleagues at Saatchi & Saatchi, Richard and Inken have worked with senior leaders from industries including law, policing, academia, accounting and the media as well as a number of sports. So they must have exercised supreme control while politely listening to my ramblings for the best part of an hour.

I’m not entirely sure what they’ll have gleaned, but having used about 600,000 words to describe the purpose of horseracing, they then asked if I could condense it to just six. Well, what would you have said?

I’ve been thinking about it ever since and so far the best I’ve come up with is “Racing is fun, fun and fun.” If you have a Sharp Response (the name of this weekend’s selection at Hexham), please send us your answers on a postcard.