It’s that time of year again. The Cheltenham festival. And I’m not talking about books. Once again I am a guest at the legendary racing tipster Colonel Pinstripe’s week-long country house party, and during the day at his racecourse hospitality chalet, where we might have an occasional small sherry or two. It is my eighth consecutive festival. Packing a suitcase for Cheltenham has become a landmark event of the calendar year, signifying primrose time, the retreat of winter, and falling off the Lenten wagon.
My suitcase was open on the bed and I was layering in my outfits. Lounge suit and gaudy tie for the evenings; tweed suit, country check shirt and sober tie for the racecourse; black tie for the journey home. Of course the tweed suit is purely fancy dress in my case, as it is, I’d guess, for the majority of tweed-suit wearers at Cheltenham. Among the crowds at Cheltenham you can generally spot those rare, mauve-faced individuals who wear tweed for practical, outdoor reasons. My tweeds come out once a year, for Cheltenham, then they go straight back in the cupboard. When I dragged them off the hanger to pack them again, the Club enclosure badge for Gold Cup day 2011 was still dangling off the lapel, and last year’s losing betting slips still lined the pockets, the reckless amounts wagered testifying to several small sherries too many. Two thirds of a dogged-out tailor-made cigarette also came to light. This I took out into the garden and smoked with enjoyment.
I always polish my shoes for Cheltenham. I have a pair of rugged brown country shoes, and the day I pack for Cheltenham they get a good buffing. I measure the decline of our civilisation by the fact that my father brushed his shoes every day of the year, and I do mine once a year. His collection of shoe brushes was his sole legacy and the last laugh of a comedian. This year, however, the tin of Kiwi dark tan shoe polish, whose vintage design suggested that it was also bequeathed by him, was more or less empty. So I jumped in the car and drove into town to buy another.
On the return journey I stopped to pick up a hitchhiker. Long snow-white hair, inexpensive clothes, sagging mouth, aged about 50. He was leaning heavily on an orthopaedic stick. The act of waving his thumb at me threatened to unbalance him. It wasn’t until he was slumped beside me in the passenger seat that I saw that as well as being disabled he was completely drunk.
I had the car radio on, tuned to the news headlines, one of which was the massacre of Afghan civilians by a single US soldier. Pointing at the radio, the hitchhiker said grimly, ‘I’ve just come back from there.’ And then his head fell forward and lay still and he appeared to be sleeping. Good, I thought. Sleep well. There’s nothing worse than being the captive audience of a delusional alcoholic.
But then his head jolted awake and he reminded me, in an aggrieved tone, what he had just said. Evidently his chin-on-chest position had been an expression of modesty while he awaited my expressions of surprise, delight, gratitude and admiration. ‘I said,’ he said, ‘I’ve just come back from there. Do you want to talk about that?’ I kept my eyes on the road and said nothing. ‘Excuse me,’ he persisted, truculent now, ‘I’ve just come back from Afghanistan. Would you like to have a serious conversation about that?’
I said nothing. I wasn’t going to be drawn in. I just drove. ‘Just let me get this right,’ he said, drawing himself back in his seat better to survey the moron he’d found himself sitting next to. ‘I’ve just come back from Afghanistan and you don’t want to talk about that?’ Down went the head again, chin to chest, resting, giving me one last chance to come up with the right response.
This time I think he really did fall asleep for a minute. I took my eyes off the road to look at him. Flaming cheek, I thought. What a pathetic creature. I’ve met his type before. I saw it often when I worked in the mental hospital. Once the alcoholism becomes chronic like that, alcohol becomes a poison, and the victim becomes solipsistic, paranoid, deluded, prey to grandiosity, and goes from one absurd miscalculation to another. Rather like me, in fact, at Cheltenham last year. No, wait a minute. Exactly like me.
I looked with compassion at the sleeping head. Me with white hair, I realised. He stirred, came to, looked at the road ahead. ‘Where are you going, young man?’ I said. ‘I’ll drop you at your door.’ He turned and stared unseeingly at me.
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