Full English ? Check. Sugar-loaded fizzy drink? Check. Junk food? Check. Anadin Extra? Check. Yep, it wouldn’t take Sherlock Holmes to guess what yours truly was up to last night.
Having thumbed my nose up at Cheltenham’s nocturnal delights for three days, I finally made it into the town centre from my suburban retreat last night and the results were, well, predictable.
Anyone who has been on a night out in England will know the frustrations of their closing time policy. Usually, there’s none of this ‘drink up there folks’ lark we all know and love back home.
Closing time is just that in the UK, or most of it anyway. You drink up and you get out but those rules are merely there to be broken in Cheltenham on festival week, certainly if Thursday night was anything to go by.
Too many of the pubs are full of over-boozed racegoers who could do with a good night’s kip rather than another pint or double whiskey but there are exceptions slightly off the beaten track.
The Retreat wine bar of one of them. About a five-minute walk from the Town Hall, the bar is almost unique in the locale in that it is funky, lacks carpets of any kind and there is hardly a grey hair in sight.
Best of all is the fact that it is just a hop, skip and a jump away from The Beehive, a more traditional English pub replete with island bar that doesn’t seem to know the meaning of the phrase ‘last orders’.
The procedure when a dozen or so revellers rocks up to a joint after midnight in Ireland is to split into groups, adopt the most sober face possible and tip your hat deferentially to the bouncer on the way in. Not here.
Walking through the front door, the big bald, guy (aren’t they all?) merely asked everyone to respect the fact that we were in a residential zone and then we opened the doors to be smacked by a sheer wall of noise.
Cue a few more hours of singing, jostling and mayhem which, when you think of it, was the perfect preparation for the Gold Cup. Another night of madness awaits Cheltenham tonight but not this part-timer.
The tents are already being dismantled, the traffic is already pouring its slightly the worst-for-wear punters back to the four corners of England and Ireland and I’m off home via Birmingham and, hopefully, Dublin airports.
Saturday will have to get by without me.
