By the time I was 18, I’d fallen in love a hundred or so times. One of my victims was a racehorse called Wollow, and like most of my relationships, it was fun while it lasted, but at the end, I felt kinda let down.
They later said that a piece of metal, a fastener, had twisted under her saddle. Twisted under her saddle, pierced her flank and distracted her. Someone more cynical said that her trainer had been bought off. Maybe she just wasn’t as good as I thought. But anyway, the long and the short of it is that she won me a stack of money through the unforgettable spring of 1976, the same spring that QPR were top of the league. But when the big one came, I put £10 instead of my normal £5 on her, and that was just too terrible for words.
Through the painful prism of time, I can see that my despair then was actually an investment whose dividends through the years matched the losses I would have made had I carried on betting on horses. After that cataclysmic day, I resolved never to bet on another racehorse. Had Wollow won the Derby in 1976, life would have been much worse in the end. She lost. She lost, and she lost just a month after QPR were crowbarred into second place in the league after months in the top spot.
It’s All Over Now Baby Blue.
Shit. What a long, terrible summer that was.
I rediscovered recreational gambling when an uncharacteristically generous Chancellor of the Exchequer declared an end to tax on betting, 5 or so years ago. Labour had just regained power, and Gordon Brown must have felt like a Best Man with a couple of glasses of Marks and Spencers’ Cava inside him. His mood was good. What he decreed meant that the intelligent punter did, at last, have a better chance of making a profit. Which is what I’ve done. I bet occasionally on football and politics, and have done pretty well.
Why am I confessing all this? Only that I mentioned to M last weekend that I quite fancied a Palm Pilot or similar. Understandably, she hissed. So I stacked a few quid on the West Ham v Reading match. West Ham to win; West Ham to be level at half time but to win in the end; no goals to be scored before the 27th minute; the match to have fewer than 11 corners. All my bets came in, and with my profit, I was able to buy my Palm T3 without guilt, and with no marital hatchet buried in the back of my skull.
One of the first things I did was to scout round the internet for free software, as one does. I came across a sports database, and downloaded it. Scanning through the years I arrived at 1976. “Lester Piggott wins the Epsom Derby on Emperie. Liverpool win the football league”. And that was it. That’s all it said.
If only they knew.
