While browsing the shelves of Waterstones in Carlisle last weekend, I picked up a copy of Tuesdays with Morrie, an account of enlightening conversations between an American journalist (the author Mitch Albom, who portrays himself as a bit of a schmuck) and his former college professor who is dying from a degenerative disease.

First published in 1997, the book offers wisdom on life, death, love, family, work, money, fear and forgiveness. Nowadays, of course, we don’t have to talk to old men because we have the internet instead.

Thus we can gain all the useful information without the need for repeatedly shouting embarrassing questions into an old person’s ear before being required to wipe their bottom or change their colostomy bag; it’s a lot cleaner and it’s possible to do without leaving your desk. (If you think I’ve missed the central thesis of the book here, go straight to the top of the class).

So in a search for answers to life’s big questions, I switched on my computer. In response to ‘Will I go to prison if I throw milkshake over Nigel Farage?’ Google gave me 288,000 possible results.

By changing the name to Jeremy Corbyn, the number of results increased to 398,000, which suggests that the leader of the Labour party inspires a significantly different level of interest – until you start reviewing the 9,400,000 search results available to those who are concerned about the sanctions for throwing dairy products at Boris Johnson.

Google returns more than 28 million search results for the phrase ‘Hate Boris Johnson’. But anyone who thinks that’s significant should reflect on the fact that ‘Love Boris Johnson’ returns three times more - 84 million search results.

Maybe, just maybe, this has nothing to do with Boris Johnson but everything to do with the fact that love is stronger than hate.

When googling ‘Is love important?’ you’ll obtain 2.8 billion results – about the same as ‘Is money important?’. Which is interesting because when you type ‘Where can I buy love?’, Google will suggest 5.5 billion possible answers.

The more enlightened of us, including anyone who remembers the music of The Beatles, know that money doesn’t buy you love. Which is why you’ll get seven billion results when you google ‘Where can I find love?’

And while I didn’t pause to look through them all, I’m pretty certain that at least one of them will point in the direction of Cartmel Racecourse.

In the valley below Hampsfell, in the shadow of Cartmel Priory, the racecourse offers an answer to all life’s questions. There are winners, there are losers. The value of money is reduced to the role of gaming chips.

And love is everywhere: on the faces of the children in the funfair, between the generations of the families seated on rickety chairs around their picnics, in the hands of the lovers as they drink champagne on the Paddock Lawn.

Of course, I also googled ‘How do I find a winner?’, to which there were 600 million responses – but none so good as this week’s selection: Altruism in Cartmel’s £40,000 hurdle race on Sunday. Go and watch it – it’s more fulfilling than staying at home and surfing the net.