Dialects of Cheltenham

The Last Straw: It's a great meeting of cultures, Cheltenham. Nowhere was this more obvious this week than in the last race on Tuesday when a horse called Ar Muin Na Muice featured prominently.

As these things are defined, Ar Muin Na Muice is an English horse, despite being bred in Ireland, named in the first national language (it means "on the pig's back"), ridden by an Irish jockey, and trained by Jonjo O'Neill.

The fact that Jonjo is based in England means the horse would have been an English winner, if it had won. Which it didn't.

Much to the relief of the race-caller, who was clearly struggling with its name. For all the guff about how important the Irish are to Cheltenham, the locals have not embraced the Gaelic language with any great enthusiasm. Give them a French name and they'll rise to the challenge every time, rolling their Rs like Jacques Chirac. But give them a pig's back in Irish, and they'll turn it into a pig's ear.

Fortunately, you don't need much Irish or English to get by at Cheltenham, as long as you have basic fluency in horse-talk.

Here, too, there are different dialects. Many English people might misunderstand if you referred to jump-horses as "leppers". And as for describing a lepper as a "leery oul bugger", you'd be better off not going down that road at all. But nearly everybody at the festival knows the difference between a pony and a monkey (£475). And even Ireland's two main communities speak the same language for the week. At Cheltenham, Ulster says Neigh.

The big cultural divider is tweed. Tweed is not unheard of among the Irish horsey set, but the average English country sports enthusiast has a shocking dependency on the fabric. Without his tweeds, he'd feel naked. Tweed hats, tweed jackets, tweed trousers. You find yourself wondering if there's such a thing as tweed underwear, and you know that if there is, he's wearing that too. Tweed is apparently a sign of good breeding in these parts. Maybe it's like Scottish tartan, and every major family has its own pattern.

With women, inevitably, the fashions are more complicated. Hats seem to be important for members of high society, along with twinsets, pearls, and calf-length boots. But if you're a real racing enthusiast, you don't need any of those, especially the hat. On the contrary, windswept hair is the big look - in Ireland and England alike. You see women with windswept hair at racecourses, even when there's no wind. It's uncanny.

The other must-have accessory at Cheltenham is a tag of some kind, identifying you as an owner, trainer, member of high society, and so on, and defining where you can go on the course. Journalists get tags too, and they're very important. Access is vital to the work of a free press, and access to the members' toilets, where the queues are shorter, is particularly important. If you're like me, you always expect to get stopped by the security people. But not only do they not stop you, they even call you "sir" when you pass.

At first I thought this was sarcasm, but I got used to it eventually. And my favourite moment of the week was when I was nodded through towards the members' area just as an expensively dressed English woman was refused.

"But I always use this ladies," she said indignantly.

"Not today. Sorry, they've got royalty in," replied the security man, unmoved by the fact that she had calf-length boots and windswept hair. Come to think of it, that's probably why she wasn't admitted.

The downside of being a member of the media at Cheltenham is that if you're not a real racing correspondent, you get corralled into an overflow press tent, which also attracts the dregs of the earth: aka the off-duty boozing journalist.

Drawn by cheap beer and the seats "reserved for working press", these tend to spend the afternoons drinking, organising race pools, and shouting at the television set. Some of them even wear trilbies - I swear - and in the rare moments when you can concentrate, they have a habit of interrupting to say: "Sorry, mate, it must be very difficult to concentrate with all the noise we're making."

Even so, as lepper colonies go, Cheltenham is great fun, and you can understand its popularity with English and Irish alike.

It's a coming-together of people united only by their love of sport, the odd gamble, and the simple human urge to exaggerate afterwards about how much they won. Very few Irish people finished this week Ar Muin Na Muice, in any man's language. But the ones who did, you'll probably hear about. And if you're not careful, you'll be joining them next year.