‘Did I tell you about our Japanese au pair, Hideko? A lovely girl, speaks excellent English, but sometimes we have the most ludicrous misunderstandings. At breakfast one morning she started talking about the proms, you know, the promenade concerts. And my wife and I thought she was talking about the plums — we’ve got this fantastically productive plum tree in our garden. So dear old Hideko was saying it was her life’s ambition to see one of these proms. And the wife and I were saying things like: “Oh yes, they were truly wonderful last year. A bit early, but amazingly juicy. Attracted the wasps, though.” And poor Hideko looked at us as though we were both mad.’
This anecdote was related to me in a bar in the Guinness village at about 10.30 in the morning on the second day of the Cheltenham festival — Ladies’ Day — and heard with a pint in each hand. Of my three days at Cheltenham, Ladies’ Day ended messily. I mainly blame Richard Littlejohn of the Mail and his mate. Littlejohn’s cheerful face appeared in the Colonel’s chalet around mid-afternoon and I was drawn into his orbit as a piece of wandering space debris is to a bright new sun. I hadn’t met him before. I latched on. He and I had a long and animated conversation of which I remember precisely nothing. But I do remember becoming over-excited and literally flinging the glasses of champagne down my throat one after another. And then he led me back to his box in the grandstand where we fired in a good few more, and I danced with my arms above my head, and was incontinent of faeces.
A tricky and detailed clear-up operation brought me to my senses. By now it was seven o’clock. The minibus back to the country house had left without me hours before. Outside the gates I joined a queue for a taxi. I didn’t speak to my queue neighbours because it took my entire life force to stand up without holding on to anything. I faced Jupiter and Saturn, which were brilliant and unusually close together in the evening sky.
After what seemed like a week, it was my turn to take the next taxi. The driver had not heard of the country house, and said he wouldn’t have offered to take me there even if he knew where it was. So instead he drove me into town, which took him about three and a half minutes.
Badly needing a drink, I wandered into the first pub I came to. It was jam-packed. Everyone was dancing like maniacs. Ordering a drink from the bar was out of the question. Drinking it without spilling it was too, probably. So I inveigled myself into the part of the crowd where the dancers seemed most abandoned to the music and joined in.
Then I thought about a drink again and went in search of a pub where I stood a chance of being served. But I only got as far as a pair of buskers, a woman on guitar and a bloke banging on a pair of tom-toms, and danced on the pavement like David dancing before the Lord. As well as a substantial amount of cash, I chucked into their open guitar case my failed betting slips and my mobile phone. They liked me so much that they packed up their things and took me to their favourite pub.
I didn’t think much of this pub. Here, everyone was seated and watching Chelsea v. Napoli on big screens. Horrible. I wandered outside, and there, incredibly, was a taxi waiting for a fare. What’s more, he was willing to take me wherever I wanted to go, and his sat-nav recognised the name of Colonel Pinstripe’s country house.
He was a good man, the taxi driver — a devoted Muslim. He loved Allah. On the half-hour journey he did his sincere utmost to convey to me the power of Allah’s love, even for a person like me.
His sat-nav led us finally to a cottage at the end of a long, dark country lane. I got out of the taxi and knocked at the front door. It was opened by a woman, a trusting, open-hearted, perhaps lonely woman who seemed so pleased to clap eyes on another living soul that I took her in my arms and held her, and she nestled in gratefully and comfortably, as though she’d rather be nowhere else. The quickest route was to walk the last quarter of a mile across the fields, she said, when I told her my mission, and she disentangled herself and pointed to lights in the distance. I paid and thanked the astonished taxi driver, fell into a dry ditch, then set off intrepidly towards the lights; a fitting conclusion, somehow, to a Ladies’ Day that had begun with the story of Hideko and the Plums.
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