Spectators at Ladies’ Day at Royal Ascot. Photograph: Martin GodwinWhen you imagine Ladies’ Day at
Royal Ascot you may visualise a hat – the largest, most absurd hat you can imagine, a hat that looks like a suicide-bomber chicken after its glorious auto-martyrdom. And this is true. I am standing at the entrance to the Royal Enclosure, interviewing a woman with a Lego Palace of Westminster on her head. The photographers snap away, gasping, “Lego hat!” Her hat is indeed made of Lego and, to labour it, the Lego press office will later email me a document entitled Lego – Ascot hats. But Ascot is more than that.
Ascot, as far as I can see with my middle-class eyes, is the British Class System in a grandstand. It is a world of barricades and badges and net veils and is thus the most terrifying place I have encountered since I last went to South Kensington by mistake. But that is for later. For now, the hats.
Ah, hats! It is only when you watch British women dress up en masse that you realise we cannot dress at all; we dress like cats trying to learn algebra. I love us for this, because we look, to a woman, vulnerable and terrible. I have sunburn and a hole in my stocking. The woman beside me is wearing a 3ft-wide papier-mache teapot on her head and is already planning her Phantom of the Opera-themed hat for next year. But we are in denial; Jeff Banks is on the loudspeaker, praising the hats. “The hat,” he is saying, “is an exclamation mark.”
In the tiers of things that matter at Ascot, after the hats come the enclosures or, as I prefer to call them, the pens. There is a strict apartheid system here. If you do not have a badge to a particular pen, you cannot go in and you probably cannot vote either. And, to enforce it, there is an army of Group 4 security guards, all in grey. And they keep us in our respective pens.
On the far side is the Silver Ring. It is cheap and packed and it has women holding babies and eating sausage rolls. People have brought their own furniture and it is full of bins. The bins, it seems, are the focal point. Then, slightly nearer the action, is the main grandstand, which, from the inside, looks like Peter Jones. It has giant internal escalators and repulsive carpets. It houses the Middle Classes and Jeff Banks. Then, further over, and bang in front of the finishing line, is the Royal Enclosure, the pen of the toffs.
I do not have a ticket but I walk in anyway. I am carrying a large cheese roll. This is my plan. If I do not succeed in getting in, it will be the fault of the cheese roll. The security guard waves me in – victory! I am now in the Royal Enclosure. But, because it is still early it is empty apart from a woman wearing a washing machine on her head. So, although I have arrived at the apex of British Society, everyone else has left. I now have an important contribution to make to Marxist theory. If you want to demolish the British aristocracy, admit me to its pen. I also have a cheese roll.
The Royal Enclosure has benches instead of bins because everyone knows that posh people do not drop litter and, even when they do, it’s not litter, it’s the free market. “Do not bring a gazebo into the enclosure,” says a sign. (Nor hot tubs.) I sit and nibble my cheese roll, wondering whether to call g2. “I’m in the Royal Enclosure illegally,” I plan to say, “But everyone else has left. And, if I am caught, will you send a Social Democratic Swat Team?” But the cheese roll that screams “Outsider!” is, as I have always suspected, a time bomb. A man in a bowler pounces. “Madam,” he coughs discreetly, “DO YOU HAVE A BADGE?”
I wave my press pass at him like a crucifix. “I am sorry, madam,” he replies, “but you will have to move.” But I am a friend of Ronnie Corbett, I say. He is on the front of the Official Royal Ascot Magazine and I am with him. He is in the toilet with Cilla Black. But they will be back soon and then – then – I can guarantee you will be on the eastern front by Christmas! The man gives a gently fluttering gesture away from the benches and towards the bins. I think briefly of the Exorcist and Max von Sydow roaring, “I CAST THEE OUT!”
I am, in the end, glad I am thrown out, not because I am an egalitarian but because I get to see The Arrival of Joan Collins. The photographers, who have grown tired of photographing hats disguised as zebras, are restless. So, when Joan Collins appears dressed, as ever, as a transvestite outreach programme, they lunge like a confused centipede. Er, Joan, I say, hoping she will not remember all the times I have called her a transvestite outreach programme in print, what do you like about Ascot? “Not this,” she says, regarding me, as ever, as if I am a badly accessorised Matalan dress. Then comes Charlie Watts in a grey suit, thin and ghostlike. He tries to smile, fails and walks away. The photographers hurl themselves on Louise Redknapp and someone from Strictly Come Dancing instead. I leave. But the apartheid follows me.
I approach one of the escalators. But a Group 4 employee plants herself in front of me. Think Rosa Klebb. “You cannot go down there because you are not wearing a hat,” she says. I long to say that this is the stupidest thing anyone has ever said to me. That I am wearing a microscopic nanorobotic hat designed and sponsored by the China Nanchang Aircraft Manufacturing Corporation and, just because she cannot see it, it does not mean it isn’t there. But of course I do not because I am British. I know my place. I long for Trotsky and walk away.
Eventually, the Ascot PR rings to say I can sit in the Royal Enclosure grandstand to watch the racing. (I complained earlier that all I can see in the press room is the back of the Sun reporter’s neck.) So I slink back to the Royal Enclosure and sit down. I smile and murmur at the people around me but I am blanked with thin smiles. Reader, they know. They know about the cheese roll. Why am I not by the bins, where I belong? We applaud the Queen as she comes past in her carriage. (I do this unwillingly but I am outnumbered.)
The Queen looks, as ever, like an angry sweet sitting on her rage. She waddles to her box to watch the show. There’s not much left to do but sit down, eat the cheese roll and wait for it all to die.
The Retail Group Debenhams who earlier in the year used plus sized models in it’s stores has now gone another step along the road for realistic images and has issued instructions not to photoshop it’s latest bikini adverts.
A sign in the Debenhams window will read: ‘We’ve not messed with natural beauty; this image is unairbrushed. ‘ It will also show customers an example of just how much the image could have been altered.
