Twenty ways to miss that big horse race

Stay in

1 Install a flotation tank in your home. Escape from it all floating in the dark listening to Dido - or your own lungs wheezing, whichever you find the most musical.

Alternatively annoy the military folk at Menwith Hill enough and they might invite you to try out their own sensory deprivation techniques

2 Spend next week drilling your family in the fine art of survival. According to Government booklet Preparing For Emergencies you should gather about you tinned food and bottled water; medication; a radio (but take out the batteries - you don't want to overhear commentary of the Gold Cup); useful phone numbers (doctor, priest, off licence); torch, candles and matches; and a first aid kit.

Then huddle together under the dining room table for five days, eating spaghetti hoops warmed in the tin over a fire of burning bandages

Go out

3 Challenge the kids to a game of hide and seek in Dalby Forest. Send them off to disappear while you count not to 100, but to the world champion largest number, as dreamt up by mathematician R L Graham. We'd like to present it here, but according to the Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers, "if all the material in the universe were turned into pen and ink it would not be enough to write the number down". The days will fly by

4 Drop in to The Whisky Shop, new to Coppergate, York. Try drinking your way through its range of hundreds of blends and single malts, bourbons, Scotch, Irish and even Indian whiskies, and you'll forget Ascot was ever here

5 According to the Lib Dems' Focus newsletter, the following attractions are free to York residents between June 14-16: Holy Trinity Church, Goodramgate; the National Railway Museum; and York Art Gallery. We thought they were free all year round, but it's the thought that counts

6 Head south. This might be the perfect moment to visit London, as it will be empty of chin-free society charlies. And we hear that there are spare rooms to rent out at Buckingham Palace...

"Not as far as I know," said a palace spokeswoman. "I'm sure I would have heard about something like that."

Well, the Buck House dcor is not quite our taste anyway, although the breakfast is said to be good. Perhaps we'll try Windsor Castle (is it non-smoking..?)

Leave the country

7 We asked Tim Hall, travel information manager at the Lonely Planet, for his recommendations of the world's most remote outposts.

"Outer Mongolia is always in people's minds as a remote spot," he said. "Only one pitfall: you might find you go all the way there to escape Ascot and it's full of horses.

"You could canoe down a tributary of the Amazon. That's a long way from anywhere, in darkest Peru or Columbia or Venezuela. You might even come across tribes who have never seen other humans before.

"Or try south west Tasmania, which is about as remote as it gets in an English-speaking country. Its just miles and miles of trees.

"And it's fairly difficult to go to Bejing and find anyone who speaks English and can tell you what's going on at Royal Ascot."

For more, see lonelyplanet.com

8 It's your shout, so head to the 36th National Hollerin' Contest, held at Spivey's Corner Volunteer Fire Department, North Carolina, USA on June 18. The Conch Shell Blowin' and Ladies Callin' titles are also up for grabs

9 Try a different York out for size. In York, Pennsylvania, USA, there are a fine range of stores and it's a dollar an hour parking. (Just watch out for those fines: $15 for parking too far from the kerb, $50 for taking a disabled space)

10 In York, Western Australia, you can visit the York Motor Museum, home to 150 vintage vehicles, and perhaps stay for the York Olive Festival, which begins on June 24

11 Alternatively, York in Ontario, Canada, hosts a teddy bear's tea party next Tuesday and a pie-eating contest the following Saturday. You should soon feel at home, too: its council is presently persuading its residents to separate garden waste from their garbage

Leave the earth

12 NASA don't have any space flights scheduled until later in the month. But a Russian-built Soyuz rocket carrying the cargo ship Progress 18 will launch from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on a re-supply mission to the International Space Station on Monday. Smuggle aboard and you could soon find yourself 250 miles above the highest Ascot hat

13 Be abducted by aliens. York man Phil Shepherdson has. He was driving his little motorbike to work at Rowntree's in 1978 when he saw something silent and triangular hovering above the field next to the road. Strange figures were nearby, and as he approached them so his memory becomes hazy.

Years later it all came flooding back, and he asked his workmates what happened. "They said I went missing one day. They thought something had gone wrong with my bike."

As he made further inquiries at a UFO event, a stranger came up to him to say he had encountered the same triangular ship in the same location early one morning. So head to the Crayke-Huby road if you want to hitch a lift on an alien craft

14 Or just go to the YMCA, St Annes, near Blackpool. That is the venue for the Lancashire Aerial Phenomena Investigation Society UFO Conference on Saturday June 18

Go underground

15 If you can't soar above terra firma, tunnel below. Yorkwalk is planning a tour of the inaccessible Guildhall and secret passages at 2.15pm on Friday, June 17. Walkers visit the council chamber, then Committee Room 1 - and from there enter hidden York.

"When councillors sit in there, they may well be unaware they are surrounded by a honeycomb of passageways," said Matthew Stephenson from Yorkwalk.

"One goes down into the dungeon, one goes up on to the roof. It's a mystery why they're there."

Could you slip away from the official party and hide in the catacombs for Ascot week?

"I don't think so. The caretaker's very careful to watch. We count them out and count them back."

There is just enough space to creep into the crypt at St Cuthbert's Church - also revealed as part of the Yorkwalk tour. But it is a burial space with only 4ft of headroom. "Pretty spooky," said Matthew

16 There's plenty of room underground at White Scar, the longest show cave in Britain. One and a half miles from Ingleton, the biggest cavern is over 90m long. No chance of finding out who's favourite for the Golden Jubilee Stakes down here

Get haunted

17 As York is Europe's most haunted city, there are plenty of spots to meet with a ghost. Pubs, including the Golden Fleece, Pavement, and the Snickleway, Goodramgate, are packed with restless ghouls. If you want to travel further afield, UK Haunted are planning an all-night paranormal investigation at Preston Hall, Eaglescliffe in Cleveland, on Saturday, June 18. Check ukhaunted.com

Go backwards

18 Why not travel back to a time when racing hadn't been invented? It's possible with regression hypnotherapy, as practised by Richard Jackson in York.

But don't expect to find you were a superstar in a past life. "There was only one Cleopatra, there was only one Julius Caesar. Most people go back to a time they feel most comfortable with, and are ordinary people," said Richard.

"The best one I had was a chap who, we worked out, was in Finland or Sweden, with no one else around. He was in sackcloth, there were forests, that was it."

19 If you don't want to travel so far, try a second childhood. That's what many patrons of dolls house emporium The Miniature Scene are doing.

"Many of our customers are big girls rather than little girls," explained Debbie Harding, of the shop in Fossgate, York. "It's an obsession."

So they treat their dolls houses as well as their own home? "It's worse. It's more important than getting their own house right."

And finally

20 Why not go to Ascot? By all accounts, it is a pleasant Berkshire village. And it should be strangely quiet at this time of year...

Updated: 11:58 Friday, June 10, 2005