Past Imperfect

‘Any ideas for the two thirty?’ said Damian and I woke up.

‘Don’t ask me,’ I said. ‘I only ever bet on names that remind me of something else entirely.’

‘Wildest Dreams,’ said Serena, speaking into my hidden longings. ‘Fletcher gave me a list and he was sure about Wildest Dreams. Then he says You’ll Be Lucky for the Gold Cup.’ Was there no horse ru

‘Who’s Fletcher?’ asked Damian.

‘Our groom at Gresham.’ It was as if that simple sentence, carrying as it did in the few words it was made of the absolute divide between her life and his, flung him away from her side.

‘Joa

‘Did you see that nonsense at the gate?’ Mi

‘No, but I heard about it.’ Serena smiled. ‘It sounded quite fu

‘She’ll be all over the papers tomorrow,’ I said.

I must have sounded like a complete idiot. ‘I know that,’ she said. ‘But what does she want from it? What does she get out of it?’

‘Fame?’

‘But fame for doing what? Taking off her trousers? It might make her famous for being famous but what’s the point of that?’ Serena was bewildered by the choice that Joa

The idea of being famous for being famous, a phrase we often used, was a risible and pejorative dismissal in those distant days, but the concept was, of course, a harbinger of our own time. The current fame mania is often mistakenly described as the Cult of Celebrity, but this at least is not new. There were always famous people and they were always interesting to the public. Nor, as again the argument goes today, were they all famous for doing wonderful things. There have always been well-known rakes and showgirls and criminals and worthless stowaways among the great, but as a rule they developed personalities that justified their stardom. What is genuinely new is the Cult of Non-Celebrity, the celebration as if they were famous of men and women who are perfectly ordinary. The oxymoron of the unknown celebrity really is a modern i

Joa

I learned this from a conversation I had with Joa

Once through the door, I was suddenly propelled into the middle of the other Ascot and in some ways flung forward into the future, into our present day. Toughs in shiny suits, or with no jacket at all, jostled past with their women gaily, if sometimes surprisingly, adorned as I pushed on towards the covered escalator that would take me up to the floor where the boxes could be found in this different and even uglier stand. Here and there, dotted about in the crowd, there were fellow Enclosure members battling their way to and fro, and there was some joshing, wolf whistles and the like, to mark the difference in our costumes. This rapids-ru

The boxes at Ascot have always occupied a kind of limbo position when it comes to the whole event. There are boxes set aside for major trainers and owners, and of course I do not mean these. Their usefulness is logical and credible, but those people were always present at Ascot as part of the racing fraternity and never because of fashion. They will continue to be at the meetings, long after the beau monde has moved on. But for those who only went to Ascot for the fun and frolic, a day out with some horses in the background, the boxes were always faintly unconvincing. To start with it was not necessary to get an Enclosure badge to rent or visit one, and in the old days, when the authorities exerted some control over whom they admitted to the Enclosure, the boxes could become the haven of the socially not-quites, those divorced actresses and gri

The second problem was that most of them were simply minute. You went through a door in a concrete gallery, to be admitted to an itsy-bitsy entrance hall, with a little kitchenette from a 1950s caravan on one side. This led into the space for dining and generally living it up, which was roughly the size of a hotel bathroom, and beyond was the balcony, where two people could just about stand side by side on two or three steps. All in all, the average box was about as capacious and gracious as a lift in Selfridges. But to the mighty ones who are socially insecure, a much larger group than many people realise, they offered a chance to enjoy the race meeting on their own terms, in a place which might be modest but where they were king, instead of spending the day detecting sneers and slights in the behaviour of the Enclosure crowd that surrounded them. I would guess this was the appeal for Joa