Racing Feature Brian O'Connortalks to the globe-trotting Paul Stafford, who hopes to celebrate his birthday with a festive win for Blueberry Boy at Leopardstown

Paul Stafford will be 39 on Tuesday. Which means coincidence-punters packed into Leopardstown's St Stephen's Day meeting will have no problems identifying Stafford's horse, Blueberry Boy, as their pick in the Durkan New Homes Novice Chase. What better time for a feel-good success to warm the cockles than Christmas?

But even a priceless Grade One victory for an unknown "birthday boy" trainer against some of the most powerful outfits in the country wouldn't tell Stafford's full story. In fact, it wouldn't even come close. This tale, after all, has already been to the other side of the world and back.

Not that the evidence of world travel is immediately obvious at Stafford's small stables near Rolestown in north County Dublin. Instead, all round is evidence of a self-contained and tight-knit family operation. The 20 or so horses in the string clatter around the yard on shoes put on by the trainer's farrier brother, James. Another brother, Colm, rides out at weekends, and the work of yet another brother, Thomas, a carpenter, is all around the stable doors as well as in the horse walker and the lunging circle. Behind the scenes, Stafford's father, Tommy, expertly negotiates a wheelbarrow to the muck heap.

It's the sort of scene repeated in hundreds of family yards throughout the country, and if there is some surprise at finding such a rural scene just a matter of miles from the capital city, then that only betrays ignorance of the area's horsey tradition. Planes might whine overhead from the nearby airport, but on terra firma there is a long history of good horses leaving the ground too. One by the name of Arkle was trained just a few miles away. Yet there is a link.

Tommy Stafford spent 32 years handling baggage at Dublin Airport, ending up as supervisor, and at the same time inculcating his children with his love of horses. The family might have lived in an estate in Swords, but for the kids there were always ponies and the idea of emulating their father who briefly rode as a jockey in the 1950s.

"Never rode a winner and there was no money in it, so I packed it in," remembers Stafford Senior, who has the twinkle-eyed shrewdness of a man who had his last naive thought sometime in the early 1960s. Sure enough, soon after retiring in the mid 1990s, he invested in nine prime acres of north Dublin and looked east for one of his sons to fulfil a family dream.

By then, Paul Stafford's desire to become a trainer had taken him to the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, half an hour's drive north of the city of Sapporo, where from December to April he shivered in ridiculous amounts of snow before sweating buckets in tropical heat during the summer. The Russian coast was nearer than Tokyo. In short, he was a world away from Fingal.

"It was a huge culture shock, but my goal was always to be a trainer and the idea was to save enough money out there to come back and start up," he says. "I was breaking yearlings and educating locals on looking after racehorses at the Machikave Farm. I was on a one-year contract at first, but I stayed for three years."

Stafford's determination had initially seen him leave school at 16 and spend nine years working for Jim Dreaper at the yard where Arkle, Flyingbolt and other legendary names were trained. Even then it was training rather than riding that interested him, but he still managed to ride three winners, and also ride work in Newmarket for five summers, before leaving Ireland to work in Switzerland for a year.

"The standard of horse wasn't great in Switzerland, but the money was," he remembers. "Being a jockey was frustrating, but if I'd really wanted it, I could have made it pay. In fact, if I'd been better as a jockey, it might have made it easier to become established as a trainer."

But in Japan, what was important was his ability with young horses and the quiet calm that helped him turn so many locals into competent riders and stable staff. Quietly spoken and low key anyway, Stafford's way was to encourage, and, given he was Irish, there was no question of his authority being questioned.

"The Japanese are lovely people, very placid. But at that time they wouldn't have had the same skill with horses as the Irish over there. Our job was to look after the horses at Machikave Farm and educate the riders," he says.

"We got all sorts coming through. Kids who wanted to be jockeys. People who'd left college thinking 'there must be more to life'. Give them a few months and they were all riding three or four lots a morning."

The horses emerged in good shape too. One, Machikave Fuhukitara, ran in the 1997 Japanese Derby and won a Group One.

But there was also a much more important reason for Stafford to throw himself into the local way of life. Also working at the farm was a girl from the southern city of Kobe. When the Dub returned home, he brought his wife, Kaoru, with him. They have two girls, Emma and Hannah, whose name means flower in Japanese. The home in Rolestown is very much bilingual.

"Japanese is a very hard language to learn. I remember in Switzerland, I picked up some Swiss German, and most European languages are in some way familiar to us. But with Japanese, it was much harder. Basically I depended on word association. I'm not too bad now.

"But Kaoru's English is very good. She loves it in Ireland and works part-time in the local Montessori. We don't get back to Japan that often, but we try to speak Japanese to the kids so they can communicate with their grandparents," Stafford says.

Building up a training operation from scratch in the last seven years has been a massive task, but initially concentrating on the point-to-point circuit paid off when Tusker Flop proved anything but a flop and won four times. It resulted in the kind of word of mouth that Stafford is banking on to build the family operation.

"I've never advertised for owners because you get the wrong people. They see you're starting off and think they can get stuck into you. The biggest thorn is getting paid. If you don't get paid for a couple of months, it takes the profit out of it. Bigger trainers can handle that, but it takes our living away," he says.

Instead, most of his owners are north Dublin locals, including Joe Keeling, who took a chance on a young horse that initially didn't impress as a future star.

"Blueberry Boy nearly killed me the first time I rode over hurdles. Just landed and took off. He was very difficult. Even now I ride him out myself every day. But we persisted and now he's a very good jumper.

"We would have been happy with third or fourth on his first start of the season, but he ended up winning a Grade Two at Punchestown. Then in the Drinmore, I was a little bit surprised that he found the two and a half miles too much. I think in time he will stay further, but for this season it looks to make sense to stay at two miles.

"If he did manage to win on Stephen's Day it would be massive for us, but if it brought in more owners it might present us with a nice problem. As it is, we can operate on the land we have and by taking the horses down to the beach in Donabate. But if we expand, it could mean having to get more land and putting in an all-weather. I don't know if we could afford to do that here," he says.

With Dublin land prices the way they are, that could mean a move. But moving about is hardly an unknown for the Staffords. And if Blueberry Boy can maintain his progress this season, it would mean moving with a very light heart indeed. As for Tuesday, can anyone think of a better birthday present than a winner? Certainly, Paul Stafford can't.