Rogues and funsters

At Cheltenham this year I was once again a guest of racing tipster and bon viveur Colonel Pinstripe. The Colonel is famous for his rambling, gossipy, sexist, often libellous telephone tipster line, the avowed goal of which (seldom attained) is to send callers home with ‘bulging trousers’. Serious, high-rolling gamblers who ring up his tipster line must be surprised to find themselves invited by the Colonel to repeat solemnly after him, as if it were a mantra, the words ‘bulging trousers’, having earlier learnt, at a pound a minute, about the Colonel’s obsessive passion for the wife of Irish trainer Willie Mullins.

In chalet 47, a nomad-style tent within a tent full of other nomad-style hospitality tents, Colonel Pinstripe hosted his annual party of lords, knights, politicians, bankers, venture capitalists, racehorse owners, trainers, gamblers, agents (football and literary) and journalists, all of us qualifying for our invitation by virtue of being, in the Colonel’s words, either a ‘rogue’ or a ‘funster’. ‘Rogues