Who wouldn't relish the prospect of sallying forth to a small corner of Berkshire to see how the other half lives, if only to discover they're often just as poorly behaved as the rest of us?
Last Saturday, this column addressed and nullified the very grave threat to the fabric of English sport posed by footballers or their managers waving imaginary cards. Described erroneously by some as an epidemic of truly terrifying proportions, this ostentatious brandishing of nonexistent small red rectangles appears to have ceased completely since last weekend's 900 words of sanctimonious, hand-wringing blather rolled off the presses. Don't mention it; righting mini-wrongs through shame is what we're all about.
This weekend it is to the sport of horse racing that we cast our rheumy gaze in the hope of providing solutions to more pressing problems that aren't really there. An occasional circus of death that has been traditionally bedevilled by race-fixing and betting scandals, the Sport of Kings has more recently been dogged by incredibly tedious bickering over whip regulations. For those who haven't been following it, this somniferous debate centres on the number of times riders are allowed to strike their mounts during a race, rather than the intensity with which it is acceptable for members of the English landed gentry to violently thrash small jabbering Irishmen in arresting silks whose ineptitude in the saddle has just cost them a sizeable purse.
Last weekend, however, the whip debate was eclipsed by an even more mundane controversy, when the panjandrums who run Ascot racecourse embarrassed both themselves and customers who had fallen foul of the famous venue's new and even more stringent dress code, which had been announced to much sneering from the cheap seats earlier that week. In amusing scenes that called to mind Nathaniel Hawthorne's exploration of the themes of sin and guilt in his harlot?driven literary vehicle The Scarlet Letter, Ascot officials decided to admit inappropriately attired patrons who had paid to get into the Premier Enclosure, but only after advising them of their sartorial faux pas and affixing a bright orange sticker to their personage to highlight their shame. We can only presume they opted for garish adhesives because it was thought the sight and sound of so many slovenly tie-less gentlemen racegoers forced to traipse the concourse ringing hand-bells and shouting "Unclean!" might have frightened the horses.
Many in the media were outraged by what they perceived to be shameless mortification of Joe Public by the hoity-toity fashion police, with one particularly hysterical commentator going so far as to liken the stickers to the coloured inverted triangles sewn on to the uniforms of prisoners in Nazi death camps. The powers that be at Ascot, however, were quick to defend themselves, saying the motivation behind their discs of dishonour was emphatically not to embarrass anyone who hadn't worn appropriate duds. The badges, they explained, were instead supposed to signify that the bearer had already been given one dressing down for not dressing up and should therefore be exempt from any further hectoring from over-enthused jobsworths. Ascot, they insisted, could never be accused of being overly officious or posh.
Such unconvincing bluster will come as news to anyone who has ever visited the racecourse's Royal meeting, a thoroughly splendid summer melange of pomp, pageantry and haute couture which, it could be argued, is actually enhanced by its draconian terms and conditions, plus the enforcement of a dress code so strict that, no matter how sweltering the conditions, gentlemen in the most exclusive enclosures are forbidden from removing their jackets until a pompous public announcement is made giving them permission to do so.
But while the atmosphere around Royal Ascot is undeniably snooty and elitist, the grandeur and strict adherence to antiquated protocol remains very much a part of its charm. Who among the riff-raff wouldn't relish the prospect of occasionally sallying forth to a small corner of Berkshire to see how the other half lives, if only to discover they're often just as poorly behaved as the rest of us?
At Royal Ascot, it's not unheard of for posh people to sniffle suspiciously as they emerge from lavatories, brawl violently, engage in very public displays of x-rated affection and drink their own body weight in expensive pink champagne. And then there are the ladies: shimmering visions of beauty who arrive at the course having apparently sashayed forth from the glossy pages of Vogue magazine, only to leave six hours later looking panda-eyed from teary smudged mascara, their once proud fascinators comically flattened and askew as they totter, Christian Louboutins in hand, drunkenly towards the exclusive car park in bare, blistered feet.
No, Ascot racecourse's problem is not that it is excessively posh, it's that it continues to deny snobbery still exists within its environs in the face of all evidence to the contrary. And it is when this condescending hauteur is ostentatiously rubbed in the faces of us little people that it begins to lose its allure. Being sniffily told you're inappropriately dressed to enter a particular enclosure is invariably irritating, not least when you've paid through the nose for a ticket to be among the lowly riff-raff there to see rather than be seen. For �50 you get to shuffle around below stairs at ground level chugging lager from a plastic pint-point, under the gaze of the decent stock clinking crystal four floors up. It's a lot of money to shell out for the role of extra in a metaphor: they are looking down on us all week long.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2012/jan/27/royal-ascot-snobbish
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