How drunk can you get at online Cheltenham?

CHELTENHAM Festival has always been the perfect excuse to get wrecked from 10am while pretending to watch horses. But how can you reproduce that online?

9am: Be up and at your laptop laying bets, discussing odds in a chat window with friends, and keeping it light with a white wine spritzer to take the edge off your hangover. If you are not hungover, you have failed to properly prepare.

10am: Dress up in top hat and tails or, for ladies, a dress with a surrealist hat too large to fit through doors. Look at yourself in the wardrobe mirror. The urge to drink should rise naturally.

11.30am: By this point you should have lost money on several horses and be consuming an entire bottle of Dom Perignon with a wafer-thin slice of smoked salmon on the side to soak up the damage. If you don’t have any, Sheba Classics Salmon in Terrine pouches are just as good.

2.30pm: You’ve won your first bet! Celebrate by falling backwards from your office chair and imagine yourself lying on mud, surrounded by a forest of uncaring legs. Knock back some gin from the hip flask hidden in your fascinator.

5pm: Several hours should have passed without you realising when you step out of the wardrobe and see your friends waiting for you on Zoom. Order another bucket of champagne, chat yourself up while serving it, then realise you’ve been sick down your front.

10pm: Awake with a start to find your monitor no longer showing horseys but the inside of a private club. Discover you are playing online roulette, and have just placed £2,000 on red. Black out again.

2am: It’s time to throw yourself out of your own house, have a little doze on the street, stagger back in through the door before falling unconscious. Congratulations! You’ve recreated Cheltenham in your own home. Now repeat every day this week, hoping you win enough to buy a new liver.

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Seven countries Britain could invade to cheer itself up

THE government is struggling and clearly fancies a nice patriotic voter-rallying war. Who should we invade to restore our national pride?

Andorra

This country of 181 square miles on the France-Spain border is easily beatable, even with Tory cutbacks to our defence budget. With only a small ceremonial army we could take the place in hours and go on about it for years. Plus with Gibraltar in the south we’d have Spain in a classic pincer movement.

Antarctica

An easy win – there’s no army there, and our troops can take down penguins no bother. We can use the Falklands as a staging post and perhaps begin exiling prisoners there, like we used to with Australia.

The United States of America

A mob of meme-posting Trump supporters took the Capitol building in hours, so imagine what the SAS could accomplish. It was ours originally so we’re entirely justified, they’ll be glad the grown-ups are stepping in after the last few years, and we can get them to drive on the left, call ‘cookies’ biscuits, and stop saying ‘aluminum’ when they mean ‘aluminium’.

Scotland

Currently part of the UK, but we could give them independence on Saturday evening, then invade in the afternoon when they’re all pissed. By Sunday, status quo and the union will be restored. Can be repeated on a weekly basis like in the 1700s.

The Moon

Given there’s no one there, all we have to do is send one person up with a Union Jack and we’ve won. We don’t have a space shuttle, but we could give the contract to Matt Hancock’s pub landlord mate who can apparently knock up anything at a moment’s notice.

Ireland

Obviously.

The EU

They robbed us of our bendy bananas and made us have maroon passports. Well, we’ve suffered enough. Why did take back control if not for war? We’ll be halfway to Greece by the time their unelected bureaucrats start debating in Brussels. Once they’ve surrendered, we’ll force them to sign a free trade deal giving us freedom of movement and goods within the whole bloc. That’ll show them.

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