Another week in paradise...

Well, that’s done and dusted, and I suppose I should be thrilled to be out the other side of Royal Ascot Week with all my digits and toes still attached. Apart from a slight haziness, I’m generally in good working order. The mailbox is flooded with advice and recipes for ideal Ascot picnics; the best Ascot sandwiches; the best shortcut solutions for feeding 40 people on a budget, food transportable by car; the best place to buy a decent 20‑year‑old tawny for chilling in every sense.

However, as luck would have it, I already had the answers to almost all those and more apt questions, thanks entirely to the kindness of many friends who lunched me to a standstill. So many highlights that, on some different planet, they probably think it would be frightfully sophisticated to take photographs of it all and project it onto a cloud.

So far this week, I’ve enjoyed a high‑end chef’s eight‑course tasting menu, served by staff in uniform. I’ve had the best Caesar salad I can remember, and a salsa verde with cold beef that was to die for. That was accompanied by a sensible pudding for all garden lunch parties, viz, homemade ice cream in high-end cones - it must be sensible because I fully intend stealing it and possibly even serving it in the dead of winter!

However, nothing beats a good graze. An appetiser of smoked mussels and chilled fino, an amuse-bouche of recovering Old Harrovian, trays of Parmesan shortbread biscuits, homemade sausage rolls with reggae reggae sauce, plus a pud of chopped bananas, fresh raspberries, very high-end ice cream made in Scotland, and hot chocolate‑toffee sauce. To this had been added a proper measure (glass) of honeyed rum that the Royal Navy would have been proud of. The drink itself was British, and I had never heard of it, a Cotswold drink - what isn’t these days - Beeble's British rum liqueur made by Matt Brauer and Nicola Reed. They’re HERE.

Best Rose of the week: AIX. Don't ask, just get it. Best sherry of the week: A chilled 2025 Fino En Rama - which I have never tasted before. It is a raw, unfiltered, and unclarified style of Fino sherry, which is bottled straight from the cask, bypassing a whole pile of stuff. This gives it a natural, slightly hazy appearance and delivers an intense, savoury flavour profile defined by notes of sea spray, toasted almonds, and fresh bread. Just delicious, and if you’re determined to consume a kilo of Parmesan biscuits solo, this will help!

I’m so sorry I’m being boring, but lunch with good friends and their friends is simply one of the great shareable joys of life. With very old friends, one often suddenly finds that Dingbat, whom you thought you’d only just met, had been to the same party in ‘82 and behaved as badly as you did when the Meribal riot took place, and so on and so on and ad infinitum. Six degrees of separation in the Cotsolds? Three at a push! So lunch was really jolly, and the presence of an Old Harrovian who was splendidly in character made for a great gathering. Most importantly, my new linen kimono jacket in the manner Akashi-Kama or Yohji Yamamoto was a huge success. It is a universal truth that I make all good clothes look cheap, and it has taken me a while to realise I should save a lot of money, and simultaneously cut out a whole pile of design grief - so I went to Ali Express. Genius… best £20 I’ve ever spent if one forgets Champerico in Guatemala

And whilst we all wine and chat and watch the racing on various televisions, what of the great course? Sadly - and this is just a guess, mes braves - but I think Ascot has managed to create a perfect storm at exactly the wrong moment. It has become vulgar and appears greedy, when the old money either cannot afford it, or is being careful before The Norse Man pillages our villages, estates, homes, and wood-burning fires, or really doesn’t want to spend £160 per day to watch a tidal wave of vomiting Hoi Polloi “Experiencing” the RE.

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My man in the tent tells me that at some or all of the Private Clubs, a photographer and an assistant barged in on the apparent “say-so” of The Ascot Authority and started taking photos. When I inquired of my man if these damned interlopers had been shot on the step rather than being allowed inside, it turned out that they had been wandering around doing whatever. Which bit of HMRC, AI manipulation, Burnham and Rayner, class warfare, facial recognition, Town v Country, and a general antipathy to men in morning coats and posh voices, is no one aware of yet? Only a fool is photographed by strangers at Ascot.

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Also, worrying news for all of us who have ever used Trusted Housesitters. Don’t trust them when they say they carry out thorough checks, because I have chums who have used them, been robbed, been fobbed off, talked to the police, and the strictly OTR observations of Old Bill are eye-watering. As at the time of writing, it is still possible for Anne Get Your Gun, who has a passport in the name of Ms Annabelle Gun, a driving Licence in the name Anne Gun, and a bus pass in yet a third variation and still be accepted despite being “checked” and still robbing houses. The implication, if the UK office is failing to respond and to fully assist the police who are involved, or to do more for the robbed clients, is simply too horrid to contemplate… still, it makes you think.

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More tittle tattle from the drinks aisle in the Lambourn Co-Op. The Osbourn bottom saga rumbles quietly on, and there are inevitably many alleged “original” snaps of the offended bottom, which apparently belonged to a BHA official or what used to be known as simply an employee. The general consensus is What a Dick, but always with the caveat… haven’t the BHA got better things to do?

On another matter entirely unrelated, I was delighted to see that the highly prominent and controversial football figure Kia Joorabchian has borrowed another £15m to invest in the bloodstock market.

While routinely described in the media as a “football super-agent,” he is technically an unlicensed football dealer and investment manager. He famously orchestrated the complex and highly controversial third-party ownership transfers of Carlos Tevez and Javier Mascherano to West Ham United in 2006. Over the last few years, Joorabchian has radically shaken up the horse racing industry through his ownership syndicate, Amo Racing.

In his early career, investigative outlets like Private Eye, along with major sports journalists, heavily scrutinised Joorabchian due to his proximity to controversial capital, such as in 2007, when his company, Media Sports Investments (MSI), and various offshore vehicles were heavily linked to the late, exiled Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky. Then, in 2007, Brazilian authorities issued an arrest warrant for Joorabchian on money-laundering allegations stemming from MSI’s takeover of the football club Corinthians. While the case was completely and unconditionally dismissed in 2014, it cemented his reputation as a target for financial investigative journalists. More recently, however, financial and bloodstock journalists—most notably through extensive coverage in the Racing Post—have uncovered that Amo Racing is not built on hidden cash. Instead, it utilises a sophisticated corporate finance structure. Investigative tracing of Amo Racing’s financial filings revealed that the operation is backed by Apollo Global Management, a massive US private equity giant. Later in 2026, details emerged that Apollo had expanded the terms of a massive multi-million-pound loan facility specifically to fund Joorabchian’s bloodstock acquisition strategy. Apollo is a highly regulated, publicly traded US institution; its financing requires stringent, institutional-grade Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Source of Funds checks. This corporate loan structure effectively insulated Joorabchian from the ongoing allegations of unverified "shady" wealth.

So that’s alright then… nothing to worry about, and we can all get back to the real world of BHA prurience.