Sideline Cut: Over the years, your correspondent has been fortunate enough to have been paid to attend some of the great racecourses of the world and, rather like a curate's egg, the results have been mixed.
At a Breeders' Cup in Santa Anita, the Los Angeles police picked your hero up for the peculiarly Californian offence of walking. Apparently only the drugged or insane go in for such exercise in Arcadia.
Not long afterwards, a two-hour wait for a taxi outside Longchamp after one Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe ended rather abruptly when a large Arab gentleman made a proposition that had yours truly belting down the Bois de Boulogne.
It was hard to blame the Victoria Racing Club though, who were understandably cranky about the fake breasts "incident" at the Melbourne Cup, and nothing will ever erase the memory of being puked on by a precariously high-heeled Scouser on the train back to Liverpool from the Aintree Grand National.
But there was a time when the idea of being at the mercy of a big, bulimic, Parisian policeman with a plastic-boob fetish would have seemed easily more attractive than crossing the Shannon for the Galway races. Allez le Puke would have been the cry, because I used to loathe even the idea of what is going to take place at Ballybrit next week.
The eagle-eyed among you will notice the use of the past tense. I don't hate Galway anymore, which will no doubt allow the city's citizens sleep easier tonight, even though it continues to possess more than its fair share of poncho-clad, guitar-flailing "musicians", never mind the widespread and wholly inexplicable use of the word hurls in relation to hurleys.
The races, however, used to cause rashes. It was an immature thing, probably, brought upon by the absence of what seemed to be sporting logic. The whole idea of competition after all is supposedly to find out who is best. Therefore logic dictates the better the competition, the more interesting it is. In the racing sense, that means the best horses running against each other. But Galway confounds the theory.
It is a fact of life that most of the action on the racecourse at Ballybrit next week will be - how should one put this delicately? ordinary. Sure, there will be hype and expectation around Wednesday's William Hill Plate and Thursday's Guinness Hurdle, but the same horses would have been attracted for half the prizemoney on offer. And crowds of up to 40,000 will squeeze in like sardines to watch them whereas a race like September's Champion Stakes at Leopardstown, officially one of the very best races in the world over the past decade, will struggle to hit five figures.
In a purely elitist and general up-your-own-fundament kind of way, this used to offend some of us. Especially so, since Galway also produces an insatiable demand from editors everywhere for copy about hookers and builders wandering through Fianna Fail tents absorbing 74,982 individual sausage rolls, 49,756 metres of toilet-roll and 248,954 gallons of beer.
It's a self-perpetuating thing, you see. The more copy that's produced, the more lemmings waddle west to see what the panic's about.
But why, we wondered. It's not as if the track itself has anything to recommend it. Tight, undulating, and with a climb to the finish that would have Eddy Merckx fiddling with his hernia, the course is something of a jockey's nightmare.
The retired former champion Christy Roche once shared the view that being drawn in a low stall on the outside of a big field was a nice way to tour the Connemara countryside. Any idea of winning from such a position was ludicrous.
A prominent trainer of more recent vintage was asked to share his opinion of the track and his answer, helpfully, rhymed with clucking fit pole.
But, and this is the irrefutable truth only now making itself obvious to your slow-witted correspondent, none of that matters. Because the magic of Galway has nothing to do with what occurs on the track but rather what happens everywhere else.
A recent report by racing's ruling body confirmed the majority of racegoers go racing for purely social reasons. Which means that for them the action out on the track is effectively an opportunity for a take-it-or-leave-it kind of bet. And for two-euro-each-way punters, it doesn't really matter if 20 champions or 20 bullocks line up for the Plate - as long as they can still back that baby.
In fact, the really heartwarming bit about Galway is how 200,000 of those each-way johnnies will gather for the week, drink like thirsty horses, and enjoy themselves in claustrophobic elbow-to-elbow conditions without killing each other.
With the sun baking down, that's no mean boast. Especially to those of us who have tasted the alternative across the water.
To say there won't be rowdy behaviour at Galway this week is patent rubbish, just as dismissing all racetracks in Britain as potential ruckfests is ridiculous. But anyone who has regularly sampled big festival dates in England cannot fail to have noticed the threat of pissed-up aggro that almost invariably lies just underneath the surface.
No doubt there is a sociology thesis being prepared somewhere at this very moment as to why that is the case. It will be lengthy and profound and in the end will probably boil down to individuals not being able to hold their drink.
There will be some of those in Ballybrit next week. Just as there will be any number of shysters, chancers and geezers looking over their shoulders. But they'll blend into a brew of raucous humanity that in its own wonderfully egalitarian way shows off the best of this country.
No reserved enclosures, and no top-hatted snobbery. Just a heaving mass of punters with enough wedge in their pockets to keep an entire industry going for the rest of the year. Twenty quid in and you get the opportunity to take your chances along with everyone else.
There's a certain beauty in that. Maybe even enough for a film. Something suitably left field with a Kubrick touch, maybe. It could be called How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Galway Races.
