The new season has been slapped, begun to cry and gurgle but the issues that will take up the time and space of this column are not yet even crawling, so this week affords an opportunity instead to look out and feel smug to be racing here rather than, well in France for one.
One of the niggling background issues with the future of commingling of bets is that old chestnut of harmonisation of racing rules.
Other international sports have the same rules, whether the event takes place in New York, Prague or Caracas, but racing's localised origins have left it with some atrocities lodged deep in the rules and the psyche of the game depending on the venue.
Trust the French to have produced, even by their own lofty standards, one of the silliest race results of all time last weekend to highlight just how impossible such a proposition as harmonisation might prove.
The relevance, and the irony, of this one is that leading French racing officials have already broached the matter at an informal level with leaders from other jurisdictions, including Hong Kong.
In those discussions, the French have given voice to a foolish, arrogant view that other centres should fall into line with their own laughable rules in order to encourage French punters to bet on racing elsewhere.
Well, if Sunday's Group One Prix Vermeille - no ordinary Group One either, but a major lead-up for the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe - is any guide, we know who needs to change. That race featured France's current unbeaten darling, Stacelita, going for her sixth win and she was given a lovely run third on the fence behind pacemaker stablemate, Volver, to the home straight.