HIS mother and grandmother invest in racehorses worth thousands of pounds. Prince Charles, however, has put money on five Blackpool beach donkeys.
Through his charity, the Prince's Trust, he is backing the appropriately named Prince, as well as Lucy, Billy, Flash and Bear as they take children along the sands at the famous resort.
The £500 grant and £800 loan from the charity have allowed Peter Gallagher, 23, to realise his childhood dream of becoming a donkey driver.
He said: "I went to every bank in Blackpool, but none of them wanted to entertain me. Then one of the bank managers mentioned the Prince's Trust. "If Prince Charles hadn't helped, I don't know what I would have done."
He added: "It's always been my ambition to do this, ever since I was a child. It all started when I was nine years old and moved to Blackpool. As soon as I saw the donkeys I was fascinated."
As he was growing up, Mr Gallagher spent nearly all his spare time acting as unofficial assistant to any donkey driver that would let him. After leaving school, he took a college course in horse care while continuing his apprenticeship on the beach.
All of last year Mr Gallagher worked unpaid for a retiring driver so he could inherit his charges. Also handed down to Mr Gallagher was the coveted licence that allows him to run donkey rides on Blackpool beach.
The Prince's Trust, set up in 1976, has now provided assistance to more 47,000 young entrepreneurs between the ages of 14 and 30.
A spokesman for the trust said: "This is one our our most unusual projects. "But Peter worked on the sands for nothing in order to get experience. He has great determination and we are pleased to back him."
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Priceless documents of Alfred the Great found (The Guardian)
Vanessa Thorpe, arts correspondent
Priceless papers which document Alfred the Great's foundation of a ninth-century monastery at Athelney have been discovered at the back of a dusty shelf in a stately home.
Missing since the 1700s, the ancient charters, known collectively as a cartulary, detail the king's establishment of a religious community on the small island on the Somerset levels where he famously took refuge and where, popular nursery legend has it, he burned cakes that had been left in the hearth.
King Alfred, who is commonly credited with inventing the idea of England, is the only English monarch to have earned the title 'the Great'.
He fled to Athelney in January of 878 to recover from a defeat at the hands of the Vikings. In the darkest hour of his reign, the young king hid on the island in the marshes and gathered the forces that enabled him to go on to defeat the Danes a few months later at Edington.
In the following years, King Alfred established the basis of an English navy, a constitution and an educational system. The monastery at Athelney was founded by him in gratitude for his dramatic change in fortune.
During his stay at a swineherd's cottage, the story goes that the undercover king was asked to watch some cakes on a grate. Distracted by thoughts of war, he allowed the cakes to burn and is said to have been scolded by the swineherd's wife.
While this English folk story, first recorded in the eleventh century, is not authenticated by the new documents, another well-known fable about the monarch's time in hiding does appear.
The preface to the deeds, or grant of land, tells how the king was visited on the island by St Cuthbert. The saint is said to have appeared as a hungry stranger. The impoverished Alfred agreed to share his last loaf of bread with him and in return the saint blessed him.
The Athelney cartulary was discovered two weeks ago on a shelf at Petworth House, the Sussex home of Lord Egremont, where a county archivist, Alison McCann, came across it by chance during a clear out and recognised its worth.
The Cambridge academic Simon Keynes, a specialist in the period, had been looking for the documents since 1993, when he found a transcript of part of it. 'I was hoping the original would turn up one day,' he told The Observer .
'My best guess back in 1993 was that it might have travelled from Orchard Wyndham in Somerset over to Petworth,' said Keynes.
'Sir Charles Wyndham had became 2nd Earl of Egremont in 1750, and moved to Petworth. He took the Ely cartulary with him, so it seemed reasonable he might have taken other books. So I wrote to Alison.
'Now, eight years later, it has paid off. When she found the charters at the back of a dark shelf in an old strong room, she remembered my letter.'
The cartulary is well-preserved and in its original fifteenth-century leather binding. Four inches thick, the 490-page document is being kept at Petworth, where it was taken from Orchard Wyndham in the eighteenth century.
The find has been welcomed as 'wonderful' by Somerset's County Records Office and Bob Croft, the county archaeologist, says it will 'shed incredible light' on the study of Anglo-Saxon history.
For Keynes the discovery is also the vindication of an extraordinary piece of academic detective work. 'The credit goes to Alison for spotting it though,' he says. 'There are many new charters here and there are very few places in England with more powerful historical associations than Athelney.
'Alfred towers above all other pre-conquest kings and if this was not a pivotal moment in English history, I do not know what is.'