Cheltenham Racecourse, Prestbury Park, Gloucestershire

Mr Oil and Mr Vinegar are on their annual pilgrimage to Prestbury Park, the racecourse on the outskirts of Cheltenham in Gloucestershire,home of the annual Gold Cup Festival of Horseracing, the most important sporting event in the world...

MrO: I do love being at Cheltenham for the Festival. The atmosphere and excitement transcends all other considerations.
MrV: No it doesn’t. The place is filled with chavs and crazed Irish farmers all chucking their money away. Don’t chavs originate in Cheltenham?
MrO: Certainly not. That’s a silly lie told by the inverted snobs of the town in order to disparage the girls of Cheltenham Ladies’ College. It was claimed that CHAV was their abbreviation of Cheltenham Average, meaning the local boys. It was nonsense, although the local boys probably are rather low-rent, but that’s another matter. In fact, the word chav is a shortened version of chavini, which is the Romany name for a child. To call someone a chav is actually rather racist, if you regard gypsies as a race.
MrV: My God but you are a bore. Anyway, Cheltenham’s filled with chavs, whether it’s got anything to do with the girls’ college or not. And those slappers are hardly in a position to pass judgement.
MrO: You rant and rave every year about the crowds but the Festival is your main point of worship. It makes no sense.
MrV: Of course it does. It’s like having a favourite church but being annoyed with the calibre of the other worshippers.
MrO: What about the food, then?
MrV: I am surprised to have to admit that the food this year was very good on the first day. They chose tricky dishes and carried them off remarkably well.
MrO: I think this must be the first time that you’ve ever said anything nice about Letheby and Christopher.
MrV: As a rule I despise these giant event caterers. As a rule the food is vile. It’s not for nothing that they were known as Leathery and Crustifood. But something appears to have happened.
MrO: Perhaps they’ve changed the catering staff.
MrV: Not from the look of things – an ugly horde of obese ex-Catering Corp squaddies and spud-peelers are still, apparently, the dominant force in the kitchen. But for some reason they’ve improved their game. Scallops are a very tricky dish to get right for five people, never mind 5000. And the fillet of beef was genuinely rare and tender. It defies belief.
MrO: The chocolate cake was good too. I have a theory about all this.
MrV: Oh no. Another poncey theory.
MrO: It is that the foodie revolution – the whole Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsay thing – has finally caught up with event catering staff. That is something I could never have predicted.
MrV: Nor could anyone. I refuse to believe it. I think the whole thing is a fluke. Next year it will be rubbish again. And they have to do something about the temperature controls. For the last three years it has been unbearably hot in the tented chalets and apparently the boxes are no better. By Thursday they stink like gymnasia. Most of the time all the staff need to do is keep the doors open, but no matter how many times one asks this never happens.

Mr Oil and Mr Vinegar were guests of a senior racing figure. Their lunch and accompanying drinks in the tented village at Cheltenham cost many hundreds of pounds per head.

Cheltenham Racecourse

Prestbury Park
Cheltenham
Gloucestershire
GL50 4SH
+44 (0) 1242 539 538

www.cheltenham.co.uk/