A Portfolio Life - Gambling

A Portfolio Life

Drawing the Right Conclusion...

10/12/2018

Bets out since last post - lots
Loss since last post £190
(Tough Saturday. Better Sunday.)

One of the reasons I thought I’d have a go at drawing is because I have 10 unused artists’ pads in my stationery box. Big ‘uns (size). And why is that, pray, I hear you ask.

Well, thank you for asking. Because that’s what I write my poetry on. I start in the middle of the white page with whatever “killer line” has engaged me and draft and play and fiddle, until what usually happens is that in the heat of composition, the killer line itself, around which the very soul of the poem hugged, is deleted from the final version. Which is, at least, my excuse for my poems having no killer lines. Yeah, I know, TS Eliot probably did it differently.

But, as I haven’t written any poetry this calendar year, I was left with these unused artists’ pads. So, in wondering what I could possibly do with them, and after pondering on this tricky conundrum for some considerable time, I thought, hey, I know what they’d be good for…

In which Boris Johnson proves himself a terrible gambler

8/12/2018

Bets out £570
Loss on day £300
(Sandown's proving really expensive this year - which is surprising considering it's my favourite track)

Here's some guff from Boris Piccaninny Piffle Johnson- excerpts of a speech to bankers - taken from Robert Peston's facebook page.

"When you look at Winston Churchill you see a man whose whole career was about risk taking – he was a compulsive gambler. This was a man who took one compulsive gamble after another – and he took all sorts of positions on things that went disastrously wrong. He was wrong about Galipoli, he was wrong about the gold standard, he was wrong about India, he was wrong about the abdication, he was spectacularly wrong for most of his political career.

But in the 1930s he of course took one giant bet. He took a giant bet against Hitler and the Nazi party. And to use the language of finance, he shorted the Nazis in a big way, at a time when much of the British establishment was actually filling their boots with that particular stock. And even when Hitler had taken Czechoslovakia and Poland – and Belgium and Holland and France were about to fall, there was a huge coalition of people in London, high minded liberal people, who were passionately opposed to Churchill and to what they thought he stood for, and his shameless opportunism, and all the rest of it.

(Several missing paragraphs because they’re, um, boring. One day Eton and Oxford will be held to account for the "debating club" shits they shower us with)

" A compulsive gambler was proved triumphantly right. And I think the only lesson I draw from that is that sometimes you do need to do the difficult thing, and you do need to take a position that everyone says is too fraught with risk. And the lesson I draw from that is the UK today has every reason to be confident about our future and what we can achieve”.

Now, I may not know much about politics but I do know a lot about gambling. As someone who has always seen Churchill as a basically terrible and reckless gambler who got incredibly lucky on the biggest gamble he ever made, this much makes sense to me. I'm not sure how Boris, projecting horribly over a terrible analogy, thinks he's making a Churchillian gamble, though. Firstly, he's backed both sides at odds-on so far, so is already a loser, Now, he's nailed his colours to the one mast. but it's hardly a balls-out, contrarian, hit one out of the park, mega gamble on a complete no-hoper. Unless I've read the referendum result wrong, he's just backing the majority view.

Not just a lying entitled chancing prick, but shit at maths as well...

Spotify says...

6/12/2018

Bets since last post - lots
Profit since last post - £345
(Harry Cobden helps thing along as usual with a nice treble, even if he'd been stood down and wasn't actually riding the third leg!)

Spotify sent me a thang saying that the artist I'd listened to most this past year was Paul Simon. Well,
duh. But then it surprised me with a list of my five most-played songs, none of which are by Paul Simon. I obviously must like them...
1. Louisiana 1917 - Aaron Neville
2. Homecoming - Josh Ritter
3. Small Town Heroes - Hurrah for the Riff-Raff
4. This Kiss - Faith Hill
5. Love is a Losing Game - Amy Winehouse.
Enjoy😃

Tuesday 4th December

4/12/2018

Bets out today £385
Profit on day £85

I started watching Little Drummer Girl last night. I like my Le Carre short and tight. I personally believe The Spy who Came in from the Cold to be one of the greatest books ever written (not just a great spy novel). A great film also. So, we'll see. Anne has already abandoned it, so I'll have to fit it in after the racing's finished winter-early.

I haven't read the novel, but I liked this (probably mis-remembered) exchange.

"Do you often drink before nine in the morning?"
"Not in moderation."

It could be the tag-line to John Cheever's Journals (also one of the greatest books ever).

Talking of timeless art, what will doubtless come to be known as Twynam's Pencil Period continues apace, as I tear through my first ever 0.1 drawing pen. I've reached page 29, my attempt at which, as you can see, includes some terrible trees (amongst other crimes.) In my defence, drawing trees doesn't begin until page 32...

The Only Living Boy in New York

4/12/2018

Bets £400
Loss on day £100

"I can gather all the news I need on the weather report."

This is one of my friend’s favourite lyrics. And it's quite close to what I’ve been trying to do this year. Twitter is dead to me, and I have mainly been missing the news and am much happier as a result. Plus, the news is so repetitive and circular, I'm not even less informed.

Instead I've been thinking about two other lines in this old Paul SImon classic.
Firstly, what of this, in the Trump era, as a shout from a New York past to a present:

"Let your honesty shine now, like it shines on me."

Yes, that’s something to aspire to. Away from the posturing, and the politics and the proto-fascism, one thing I don’t get about America voting this lying cunt President is what do they tell their children. You know, like when them pesky kids test the boundaries – maybe tell a wee fib? (And this is Republican, Christian, Silent Majority, Middle America stuff). Do they tell them of George Washington and the cherry tree, as every generation in that America has done hitherto? And, if they do, what do the kids say? “Nah, fuck that, grandma, I'm gonna be like Trump.”?

Which leaves me with this:

"Half of the time we’re gone and we don’t know where and we don’t know where."

No Direction Home

3/12/2018

Total bets at weekend £1020
Profit £250
(Nicholls and Tizzard provided nice wins for their lesser-fancied hopes in the big handicaps and chucked in the forecasts as well. Richards repeated this feat on Sunday, but I missed the forecast, being lost on a hill in Shropshire.)

Well, not lost really. We were blown off one side of Brown Clee so tried to navigate a route down we hadn't tried before, without a map. Now, I'm a good map-reader - an art very much nearing extinction - and even more so considering I have absolutely no sense of direction. Anne, on the other hand, is nothing special at reading a map, but usually can tell in which vague direction to head. Together we rub along just fine.

Except this weekend she was right narky (Brexit, a lost sock, leaves, work and her brother, apparently) and had it in her head that my basic approach of just walking downhill was going to end in disaster. I kept marching forward confidently, she kept saying we were going wrong. It got so she was desperate for me to be proved wrong. She wanted us to come upon a crossroads where she could say "see, I told you so", you know, something like a sign saying car-park 3 miles, or a newsflash saying Nissan had abandoned Sunderland.

Anyway, we didn't. I marshalled us directly down to the car without incident. Which was the light getting through the cracks, maybe.

If Eric Ravilious Couldn't Draw...

30/11/2018

Bets since I last posted – lots
Loss over that period £110
(Which means I finish the month with an acceptable profit – but strip out the exceptional Skelton five-fold and it was a losing month, which is annoying.)

I think I mentioned previously that I have taken up, or intend to take up, drawing, despite having absolutely no talent at it. Or, more accurately, because I have no talent. I reckon it might help keep the voices at bay, there’s no need for validation, or to take it seriously, and so it should be strangely liberating.

To wit, I ordered a set of pencils and stuff and a book on how to do it. The cheap little box of pencils from 1H to 8B, plus erasers and sharpeners and graphite and charcoal, is a thing of beauty, not least when you’ve spent the greater part of your life building a better life by stealing office supplies. I’ve spent quite some time staring and stroking. The book that accompanied it is called something like “With only 10,000 hours of half-arsed practice, even a talentless schmuck like you will draw like Picasso…”

Sadly, there was a shock in store for me on page one. Turns out I’ve ordered the wrong pencils…

Which hopefully helps explains this, my first ever drawing…

Everyone Needs Chums

28/11/2018

Bets £510
Loss on day £390
(Ouch. That hurt. I’m trying to tip-toe towards the end of the month, protecting my profit, so I can pay a dividend. That did not help.)

Three meetings on Attheraces today. No changing channels. So, I did what I’d been planning to do in such circumstances and started five-bar gate counting of the adverts during the programme. My blog was going to be about how the channel seems to only attract advertising focused on the needs of old, sad, waste of space losers.

The problem was, an hour in, my stats weren’t backing up my narrative. There’d been loads of adverts for other stuff. You know, like it’s Christmas, or something, sometime, not very soon.

Then I thought, oh no, just maybe, hitherto, I’ve been subconsciously noticing certain adverts. They’ve been cutting through the noise, because they speak to me. Because they are meant for me. Do you know what I mean?

Funeral insurance, loan sharks, equity-release schemes, elasticated waists…

no poetry

Victoria, Giles, Woody and a Mousetrap

27/11/2018

Bets Out £430
Profit on day £30

There was a question on the deliriously lateral Only Connect last night that was about The Mousetrap and on which I scored 2 points, which is almost cause for a champagne celebration in our house (at least until the missing vowels round, of which I got 12 right ahead of the buzzer last night - just saying).

I knew the answer because, when I was about 14, I was actually taken by my mum to see The Mousetrap – for no other reason than that I was reading a lot of Agatha Christie at the time (all of Agatha Christie at the time, actually), and that it was the longest running play in the West End – twenty-odd years - which seemed unfathomable at the time.

The play was terrible, the acting worse and the atmosphere touristy and funereal, (a foretaste of my general experience of the theatre; “backache, a rumbling tummy and posh people spitting at each other” as Giles Coren memorably described it, shortly before getting (and losing) a gig as a TV theatre critic.

Thing is, that was 32 years ago. And The Mousetrap’s still going strong…

As Woody Allen once noted – eternity lasts a very long time, particularly towards the end…

no poetry

Going Underground

26/11/2018

Bets £445
Profit on day £190

Going Underground came on the radio. Took me back. 1980. I was 17. Maybe 18. I was an angry foot-staring boxroom rebel, who hardly turned up at Sixth Form, choosing instead to ransack Reigate second-hand bookshops for the gamut of European Modern Classics from Camus to Sartre, from all of which I caught a very bad dose of existential ennui.

The Jam were my band. Surrey boys, but angry dispossessed Surrey boys, suburban boys, with a way with a lyric that seemed to speak directly and only to me. I saw them live five nights in a row – at the Rainbow in London and at Brighton. The audience was – well, it was a bunch of me – all shouting along to the lyrics like we were their disciples. Jesus, no wonder Weller wanted out.

The Jam were getting popular. A number one band. That was kinda good and kinda bad. Eton Rifles had already been to the top spot. And, as history has shown, with David Cameron, without a hint of irony, citing it as one of his favourite songs, the very people the songs were deriding were becoming fans. Going Underground caught sight of this.

My friend and I decided to go underground. Literally. Well, overground. We took a Vango Force 10 tent to the top of Priory Park in Reigate and camped there for a week, without telling anyone. We lit a fire, and cooked sausages and talked about shit and stuff, and I doubt it was actually a week, and Chris kinda blew his cover by going to see his girlfriend who worked Saturdays in the newsagents on the high street but, still, he brought us back some sweets, so I forgave him. He’s a kinda famous DJ now, and she was his wife for a long time.

I wasn’t missed. My nan and gramps had given up expecting me home ages since. The world turned. I loved the song, then I tired of it, then it seemed to belong to a different time, a different world. I had grown and changed, Paul Weller had grown and changed (several times, effortlessly regenerating himself). The world had grown and changed.

Now, when I catch it, I realise that Paul and I may have changed a bit, but our core values remain intertwined, and the world, the world we were tilting at, that world is still the same. And so, here I am, all these years on, Going Underground.

no poetry

Like a Drunk in a Midnight Choir...

25/11/2018

Bets £610
Profit on day £80
(Stopped the losing run, at least. A lot of huffing and puffing to not much end though, which of course is mainly my daily lot. Today I'll be ploughing the furrow that is Dan Skelton at Uttoxeter, which has unearthed countless riches this year and is almost certainly bound for (a) regression and (b) being wildly overbet, at least judging by the prices this morning.)

There’s a verse in Leonard Cohen’s Bird on a Wire (if Leonard’s not your voice, check out a brilliant rendition by Jennifer Warne, from which these slightly modified lyrics are taken)

I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch
He said to me, "Don’t ask for so much"
And a young man leaning in his darkened door
He cried to me, "hey, why not ask for more?

That in a nutshell is how I’ve tried to navigate my way through living in a wildly capitalist society. Balancing both. I try to look down not up. I try to count my blessings. But also, I hope for better.

I take the middle ground and I have trouble with people who place themselves on either extreme. Be they the earnest types preaching moderation in all things on the one hand, or the grasping, neoliberal, cunts with empathy by-passes on the other.

In terms of my peer group, or based on any reasonable expectations of future success based on schooling, I’ve probably underachieved towards the undriven end, to my own material disadvantage, but can hardly grumble. If I had that much more I honestly wouldn’t know what to do with it.

no poetry

Jermaine Jenas - you don't have to take your clothes off...

24/11/2018

Bets out £575
Loss on day £250
(Five losing days in a row - a week is a long time in horse racing. Wouldn't mind a Saturday like last week!)

Top of the Pops - a repeat from 1986 - Simon Mayo's first show. Anne and I were watching Julian Cope and chatting about where we had separately seen him live, when Paul Young came on with a song so mediocre neither of us could remember ever having heard it before. Anne said, by way of comparison - now, I don't like it much, but "We don't have to take our clothes off to have a good time" is at least memorable - you know, by whatisname, Jermaine Jenas...

(What's doubly extraordinary about this exchange is I am almost certain that Anne doesn't actually know who Jermaine Jenas is, or has ever even heard of him.)

no poetry

Gone Drawin'

23/11/2018

Bets £525
Loss on day £75
(Much more controlled staking)

Anne, back from the car-park that is the M6, asks “What happened in your day?” To which the only honest answer is “nothing”, and to which I answered, “I lost less today than any other day this week.”

Actually, secretly, I have started drawing, you know, with a pencil. Drawing pictures of stuff on my desk, still life, I’d call it, except my versions, which are supposed to be figurative, are at best abstractions and at worst just nothing like the real thing. In short, I’m terrible at drawing. I always have been.

So, unlike writing, for which I at least have some aptitude, it’s also quite liberating. I might even buy a book on it. See if I can crack how to draw a pencil sharpener, which is what I’m failing miserably at right now. Eat your heart out Tracy Emin...

No poetry

Isobel Makes Love Upon National Monuments

22/11/2018

Bets £725
Loss on day £150
(Still, dribbling, and over-betting if that’s the outlay on a humdrum Wednesday. Must also stop farting about with evening all weather stuff that doesn’t fit my approach.)

Not content with the wonderlicious Ruth Wilson on the sofa, nor with an investigation about whether your phone is listening to you (including Matt Baker insisting they do), tonight's One Show also managed a side-chat between two guests, one of whom was Marc Almond, about one of my heroes - Jake Thackray. Not a bad way to spend an hour whilst eating fish finger tacos and necking a bottle of Burgundy...

Living the dream...

PS if you don’t know who Jake Thackray is, look below or listen to The Castleford Ladies Magic Circle, or Isobel Makes Love Upon National Monuments and, if he doesn’t steal your heart, you probably left it on a bus somewhere.

William Goldman

21/11/2018

Bets £405
Loss on day £230
(Dribbling away the profits from the weekend. Which depended on Dan Skelton, so how I managed to miss a treble of his, whilst backing his no-hopers at the other track, is something to muse upon.)

William Goldman has died, sadly. Personally, I believe the first hour of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is the best film ever made (which, if nothing else, also taught me that you don’t need the whole package to be brilliant, nor do you have to read the whole book to love it.)

My friends often use “Is it safe” from Marathon Man and of course we use half the lines from The Princess Bride without even remembering where they are from. And let’s not forget the incredibly underrated Magic, possibly the scariest film I’ve ever seen. Not forgetting Heat, or Misery. And probably the best parts of A Few Good Men.

Plus, his book, and it’s central message. “No-one knows anything.” Which rather overlooked the fact that he did.

no poetry

On Reaching Level 2000 of Candy Crush Soda...

20/11/2018

Bets out £475
Loss on day £195
(Paddy Power re-instated my account eventually)

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark were on the repeat of Top of the Pops 1986, the other day. OMG, as no-one ever said or abbreviated back then. Neither Janice from Friends nor social media had been invented.

But OMD had been going strong a good few years. I’d forgotten they’d had that longevity. I was a fan of them back in the new wave/electropop segue of the late ‘70s and particularly liked Messages from my last year at 6th form.

At Lampeter a year later, there was a bloke in halls opposite me – Steve Davis. He was six foot plus, a dyed blonde-haired Scouser who had a Sting-type thing going on that meant he would have looked cool in London. In deepest Wales he was like a homoerotic fantasy – Putin bare-chested on a horse, high camp machismo. Frankly, I was a bit in love.

He liked my taste in music, and seemed to like me. Or my worship. Whatever, we got on. He published the poetry magazine and in the first term published a couple of my “concrete poems” – both of which I still remember and still love just a little bit, crap though they were.

Anyway, the reason I mention this is, and I’ve no idea nor care for the reality, but he always said he was in the original line-up of OMD, but left before they got famous. I took him at face value. And, frankly, OMD would have been a lot cooler with him in it.

One day, hanging around the Asteroids machine, he said to me, Oh God Gary, this place is killing me. Let’s bunk off. Let’s hitch to Paris, wipe our willies on the toilet seats and write poetry about it. Really, he did. I was there.

Lord knows, we should have done, but I’d just got to Level 93…

no poetry

Let's go to Cheltenham now retirement's here...

19/11/2018

Bets over three days of Cheltenham £2445
Profit over three days £2130

My recently-retired friend kicked off his life of leisure by joining me for a three-day assault on Cheltenham – including a visit to the hallowed arena on Sunday. There was supposed to be something of a lesson involved. Things didn’t look so good on the Friday where I lost £500 on the day – actually my worst gambling day of the year so far – whilst he landed £500 on some mug £1 forecast at Wolverhampton.

Saturday proved somewhat better – with a Dan Skelton/Harry Skelton five-timer rather making the difference to the weekend’s bottom-line – even if it was at Uttoxeter rather than where we were supposed to be focusing. That's if Paddy Power don’t welsh on their bets – given they have frozen my account for “security reasons” – I’ll keep you informed.

Then a beautiful day on-course Sunday, including three winners, a couple of beautifully game horses to fall in love with (Lalor and Sceau Royal), plus the obligatory deep-throated roar as young Harry drove one home.

We had been unable to print out our tickets (long story) and, when we arrived at the ticket collection point, we had one of those excruciating conversations I’ve been getting used to recently.

“Okay, if I could just check what phone we sent the tickets to?”

“Um, sorry, I don’t have a phone.”

(Pause to take this in) (no much longer)

“Err, okay – in that case I’ll need to see a driving licence.”

“Umm, sorry, I don’t drive.”

In the end, I think he just assumed I was some old nutter and handed me a couple of tickets to get me away from him, in case it was catching…

no poetry.

The Race Run

16/11/2018

Bets Out £490
Profit on day £175
(A better day. Some discipline restored. Unfortunately, it’s now Cheltenham for the next three days, the place where discipline and I become arch enemies. And in these forays, sometimes you get the bear…)

My best friend retired yesterday – aged 56. He’s not the first of our (very lucky) University friends to do so, but is the first of our little gang. Our chatgroup wished him luck on his last day at work, and indulged in some jealousy-tinged badinage.

“I now have the disquieting feeling of having lost a race I didn’t know I was in to a finishing line I couldn’t locate,” said one.

“Indeed, as if someone has just brashly run past, elbows out, wiggling his back-side” said another.

“Actually, Gary won that race years ago,” said a third.

“Yes, but he was running in a different race” said the fourth.

Which is true. I was never running in the same race, nor in reality, in a race at all. Which I have to say, back when I was working for the Man, was often very confusing for some of the aspirational men (and it was always men) I worked with. They assumed I was some sort of competitor and either didn’t trust that I wasn’t, or lacked the imagination to see that I wasn’t, or resented me for not being in their club. Plus, I was an arsehole.

Still, I’ve never regretted, in effect, retiring from that world aged 37. There is, of course, the problem of sustenance…

Levels of Life

15/11/2018

Bets £785
Loss on day £245

Some loss of mojo this week, and a losing month so far – the first since February. Still time to turn that around, of course. Of course, there’s inevitable losing and winning streaks. There are times when last-fence fallers and photo-finishes go with you or against you, when you make lucky or unlucky split-second decisions to bet or not, and so on. But alongside that, there are also times when you’re making generally good decisions and times when you’re just slightly out-of-step, behind the beat, out of tune. This feels like one of those times. It’s usually caused by the rhythm becoming habit, by taking the profit for granted, for not paying full attention to each and every component of what I’m trying to do. So, back to basics.

In other, or possibly related, news, I have reached the not inconsiderable milestone of reaching Level 2000 on Candy Crush Soda. Without spending a penny, I hasten to add (though, to be clear, I have had toilet breaks).

No poetry

The Common Wren

14/11/2018

Bets £630
Loss on the day £250
(Yesterday was one of those days when all the early bets went wrong. Like the Gambling Gods had been listening to this blog. Plus, the stats I follow had put me onto horses with little form chance. This isn’t always a disaster – nor would it have been yesterday had Opening Batsman held on – but the length of odds and long losing runs make it feel so.)

Jokanovic has indeed paid the price. Ridiculous. Still – here comes Tinkerman – time to snap up some 5000/1 for next season…!

I read his morning that the most common bird in the UK is actually the wren. I’d have had at least 20 guesses before getting that one right.

No poetry