A proper day at the races as Knavesmire crowd revels in pure entertainment

In a little coffee shop on the north side of the city, it's 9am and you'd hardly know there was a race meeting planned, let alone one of the biggest, rowdiest and best of the year. It's all smashed avocados, frangipane tarts and polite conversation; not a folded-up copy of the Daily Mirror racing pages in anybody's back pocket; not a bleary, bloodshot eye in sight.

In 1987, when Ajdal won the William Hill Sprint Championship and I was still bordering on young, capable of three full-on days and nights in York, I would have avoided this place like the plague by sleeping off a hangover until opening time. Now I kind of like it. I must have got middle-class and old somewhere along the line.

South of the river, it's a different story. The stag parties that were lurching along Micklegate the night before have presumably found their way home, but their place has been taken by a fresh surge of very obvious racegoers, in loud suits, no socks and precipitously high heels, but not necessarily all at once.