Beneath the hats and the champagne froth, there's plenty of work to be done

A great occasion can have – and here the words must be chosen quite carefully – an intoxicating, almost narcotic effect on the viewer. In racing, a week such as the one Royal Ascot provides is an opiate to we masses; we look on, slightly glassy-eyed, a fixed grin in position, undemanding of anything bar the spectacle.

We drink it in and forget. That doesn't apply to racing alone, naturally. Pick a subject, any subject. It's easy to gaze at the Trooping the Colour pageantry and think 'England, this is England', with the worries about proliferating knife crime in the same city pushed gratefully to the back of the mind.

Watch the Wimbledon tennis, and it takes a heart of stone to look beyond the strawberries and cream and mull over the latest headlines about match-fixing in a Challenger series game in eastern Europe.