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LADIES’ DAY AT Royal Ascot is a red-letter day in the British aristocracy’s calendar, but it went downmarket yesterday as a fight broke out at the champagne bar.
Well-dressed ladies scattered as eight men in suits wielded table legs and champagne bottles in the melee – thought to have started over a woman. One onlooker told The Sun: “The men in the fight were friends. They were joined by a group of girls who were leading them on. Suddenly punches were thrown and I heard one of the girls say, ‘Oh are they fighting over me’.”
Witness Sophie Healy told the Daily Mirror: “They started pushing and shoving. We got out of the way and then suddenly our table, with a newly-bought bottle of champagne, went flying.”
The men were eventually pulled apart by members of a nearby military band at the racing event in Berkshire, England. It’s thought nobody was arrested over the incident, which unfolded as the Queen watched the races from a nearby stand.
Ladies’ Day is the centrepiece of the Royal Ascot festival, and has become famous for the outlandish costumes and hats worn by racegoers. However, not everybody was happy with the couture on show yesterday. According to the Daily Mail, racing commentator Sir Peter O’Sullevan said: “Sometimes the grandstands seem over-run by tattoos and bare flesh. It’s disrespectful – not just to the Queen, but to the horses.”
Slideshow: Some of the exotic outfits on show at Royal Ascot Ladies’ Day
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Credit where due well done although very difficult on families where there is no power. Thankfully we dont get too many storms like the few we had. Anyone see the news the UK still in bits far worse than us.
Still out in rear cross co tipp.fair play to esb networks though cant be easy working true such a backlog
Thank you for keeping this story in peoples mind.So many still have with no idea of when they will be switched back on.
Day 6 without power and im one of those isolated pockets ive been told. Probably be end of week before connection. Im going to go crazy!
A big well done to all the ESB crew, but surely they will consider putting electricity wires down under ground
Think about it….
There are 10s of thousands of KMs of local electricity cabling around the country.
How do you even begin to do that?
It would cost a biblical amount of money.
Or at least cutting back/removing of trees near power lines. A job for Coillte I would think.
There is no utility on Earth that has its rural distribution lines underground for one simple reason: cost. Undergrounding overhead lines would cost many multiples of the overhead cost and this would have to be passed on to the consumer. Our electricity bills are high enough as they are – no one wants to see them tripled, quadrupled or whatever. If it were a realistic option you’d think a place like Florida which suffers multiple major outages every year because of hurricanes would have done it years ago, but no: they have overhead lines as well. Nor would it necessarily result in the elimination of faults – they would still occur due to flooding, cable failures, dig-ins and the like. And it would take longer to repair or replace them. There would also be huge delays in connecting new properties to the network caused by the time involved in digging the trenches, getting permission from landowners and so forth. Nor of course would it be remotely realistic to initiate a programme of replacing the existing network of overhead lines with underground ones. All in all, on the face of it, it sounds like a reasonable proposition but when you examine it deeper it becomes a pipe-dream.
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