Low life | 24 March 2012

‘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.