Anonymity preserved by the hat-trick

Serena Mackesy goes undercover around the fringes of Hades and Ascot's Royal Enclosure

The great thing about an event like Royal Ascot is that it brings home those little lessons about why dress becomes archaic. Morning dress, for instance; it looks absolutely terrible with sunglasses. On a baking day with that little hint of thunder, the toffs in the Royal Enclosure sported them heroically. Well, less heroically than chinlessly, but what the heck.

Top hats, actually, are great disguise: they make everyone look identical, so the fighting pack of press photographers on the balcony above fail to spot adulterers until they have passed by.

Those feathered cartwheels that women sport are even more efficient: from above, a woman in the Royal Enclosure looks like a fried egg, a jammy dodger or a cowpat with legs. What she doesn't look like is someone with a face.

But you don't get the full experience in the Enclosure. All human life mills around outside it: the snogging, the fighting, the hand-waving, the big teeth.

What is really weird about Royal Ascot, as opposed to your average meeting, is that not only does it attract a crowd who don't make a habit of racegoing, but half of them aren't even up for the business of horseflesh at all.

Even the stands round the paddock were packed with women in hats whose backs were turned resolutely away from the parading nags and toward the milling hoi polloi. They turned back for a moment, of course, when The Queen pitched up, fetchingly arrayed in knee-length blue florals, blue hat, white accessories and toning green-hued mother. Little murmurs rumbled round. "Oh, my Gawd," said a woman who seemed to have based her gear on the costumes in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, "What does she think she's wearing?"

Royal Ascot is quintessentially British. One sees very few complexions that vary from the pale or the florid, and an aura of sun-faded chintz pervades. Racegoers may attempt to dress up like they're going to a benefit gala for Ivana Trump, but they still sink to the tops of their heels in the car parks, their top bits and bottom bits never quite match and they still kiss as though it's a tasteless foreign habit.

Clogged in the tunnel which runs below ground from paddock to grandstand and spares the Royal gang from overexposure to the proletariat, one felt a bit like one was trapped at a cocktail party on the outer fringes of Hades.

Many people never made it out of the champagne bar at all, but watched the proceedings on telly. They missed that powerful wave of sound that rushed through the grandstand when the horses hit the straight, but at least the drinking - and with basic Mumm at pounds 35 a bottle, drinking is a serious business here - wasn't interrupted.

A happy blonde women clutched a half-bottle with joy as Bijou D'Inde burst through in a photo-finish. She had had a pound on him at 9-1. "Another winner," she said, "and I'll have paid for this drink."