Blog Posts - A Portfolio Life

A Portfolio Life

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

Started Early, Took My Dog

13/11/2018

Out £460
Profit on day £75
I've been keeping Hobbs on side.

A good day. An empty day. No news has filtered through. Just gambling. Profitable. Started early, took my dog.

The slant of my day’s gambling is usually decided in the first few races – especially if they are novice hurdles or two- year old races, where the choice is between a mere handful of short-priced horses. With a tailwind the early results will give me a quick return but, far more importantly, will mean I have a fistful of doubles running on. Sometimes, after the first race at each course I’ll be set for the day – merely a case of hedging against my on-going profits and hoping for the big one. Sometimes, of course, the early results go entirely against me, and then the day is going to be a grind into profit or to limit the losses. Usually it’s somewhere in between.

Each of them a slightly different tune – but the dance, it’s a dance just the same.

No poetry

Telford Town Park

12/11/2018

Out £480
Profit on day £175

Bobby is too old for long walks these days. Indeed, many days we walk a couple of hundred yards down the lane, he stops, looks at me, and say “yep, that’s me done, mate.” So, our Sunday sojourns over the Shropshire Hills are a thing of the past. Instead we go for a lap of Telford Town Park.

Which is an amazing place, and huge kudos to the town planners who designed it – a giant park smack in the middle of Telford. The rest of the town might be a roundabout shrine to the motor car but that just makes the park seem more momentous.

It’s not small – don’t think old Victorian town parks for feeding the ducks and Sunday strolls – it can’t be far off the size of Wimbledon Common. And there’s loads going on. Apart from all the runners and dog-walkers, there’s sports fields, a huge array of playground stuff for the kids, miniature golf, a frisbee-golf course, loads of pools for fishing, and illegal swimming, picnic areas, an old chimney from the Industrial Revolution, an aerial walkway thingy, a kid’s Winter Wonderland full of large admittedly rubbish-looking dinosaurs and stuff, bikes for hire, a set of formal gardens, waterfalls, duck ponds and instant access to the Telford Shopping Centre and bars. Yesterday, there was an orienteering event going, with people crashing in and out of bushes all around us. I think it was orienteering.

No poetry.

In which a second-rate writer protects his shins by not writing...

11/11/2018

100+ Bets. Out £835
Loss on day £30
(A Nicholls five-timer and still a loss on the day. I really needed either the six-timer, or to have staked better. I even needed Roger Fell’s 25/1 winner to staunch the losses.)

Sam Leith’s long-awaited review of Indifferent Voices arrived yesterday:

It's ambiguous to begin with:

“Easy good books will, with a bit of luck, find their audiences; easy bad books will do so too, because they are often fun in spite of or because of their badness. Difficult bad books will tend to die in a ditch; and difficult good books, without a helping hand are likely to do so too.”

But then gets to the point:

“The idea of literary fiction is the rock on which many ambitious second-rate writers bark their shins. It’s what gives us plotless novels choked with portentous metaphors and pseudo-profound ruminations.”

Ouch.

No poetry today.

Friday 9th November

10/11/2018

Bets 100+ Out £550
Profit on day £110
(Just a decent day's gambling)

Fulham currently nestle at the bottom of the Premiership. No great surprise. Reminds me of an interview Mick McCarthy gave once. He had just been promoted – Sunderland if memory serves – and was being interviewed in the tunnel. “You must be over the moon about next season?” asked someone incisively. “You must be joking” McCarthy harrumphed. “We’ll be bottom after twelve games and I’ll be sacked by Christmas.” Which turned out to be true.

Which makes me feel sorry for Jokanovic, now odds-on to be the first managerial casualty of the season (plus, surely that should be Mark Hughes). Jokanovic was a hero last year. Now I assume forums and phone-ins are full of people in the cheap seats throwing veg (though, to be fair, there aren’t any cheap seats at Fulham any more, so they can throw what they like. When I started regularly communing with my dead dad, back in ’96, it cost £6 to sit in the Stevenage Road Stand, and you got a whole row to yourself.)

Anyway, he needn’t worry. Our next three away games look more than winnable. Liverpool, Chelsea, Man Utd.

I'll do well over 100 bets today, which will include keeping Ian Williams and Paul Nicholls onside.

No poetry.

The Voice of Gambling

9/11/2018

Bets 95ish. Out £525.
Profit on day £345
(A Henderson double, a 33/1 David Maxwell winner and very nearly a 500/1 double)

Some people seek mindfulness. Not me. I’ve always sought its partner, its mirror – absence. Emptiness. Mindlessness. Stop the voices. Including my own.

Silence doesn’t do this. Meditation, or at the least a lack of distraction, is a gateway to either all the other (indifferent) voices I keep trying to keep at bay, or my one strong inner narrator voice, prattling endlessly on and on.

Gambling does it for me. Partly. The day’s slow movement from morning study and early bets, through to the three hours of frantic betting activity – and it’s important to me that it is frantic – for it to work I need to be betting in virtually every race. That’s what provides the flow, no race any more important than any other, with occasional spikes for big races, or for small races with big possible pay-outs. And then, the winding down with tomorrow’s cards, an updated spreadsheet and a review of the day. And then sleep, thinking about the day gone and anticipating tomorrow – but only in terms of betting. This flow, the total concentration is part of it, of course. The process takes over, and at speed, gathers a rhythm that carries me along in its embrace – a glorious dance.

It’s not emptiness as such, but it is an emptiness of all the things that fill the void otherwise and lead to depression, anxiety, rage. Much better to be cursing a bad bet, or a bad beat in a photo, than about some perceived slight, or some keyboard twat on social media or Brexit or the impending world apocalypse, or any of the other thousand things I might wurrett at otherwise, all of which might bloom voices in my mind.

It’s not voiceless as such, but the one voice is ‘gambling guy’ – excitable but mainly calm, hopeful but mainly pragmatic, with skin in the game but sat sideways to it, focused but driven by distraction. Most people looking in from outside would see this bloke as a loser, as a waste of space, as a fat bloke with a laptop staring at the telly. In fact, people I know and love think that way, including my wife sometimes. Me, I like this guy. I prefer him to the alternatives. And that makes me happy.

No poetry.

Carol Vorderman Sucks Paul Dacre

8/11/2018

75 bets Out £480
Loss on day £80

Nottingham sucks. Under my new methodology, it’s easily my worst performing course (chased hard by Redcar, no wonder this week’s been hard). I’m down £525 there this year. I might decide to omit courses next year. I might not. Pontefract is my best performing course and I would never have predicted that. I think I probably need a larger sample size than one year.

Carol Vorderwoman has been a surprisingly large part of my life - not least in the Dashing Des Kelly years - and I couldn't help noticing on tonight's One Show that her breasts seem to have taken on a life of their own. And her arse. In fact, much like Trigger's broom, I'm not sure how much is original.

Which is fine - go your own way - rage against the dying of the light. Write your own history. Which she also managed to do - on a sofa with Peter Andre and Graeme Swann, and that there Oti (swoon), plus Alex and Matt, all of them talking about the wonder of their times on Strictly Come Dancing without ever mentioning Carol's own less wondrous experience of said event.

I'd still watch her doing sums, mind..

Apparently, Paul Dacre spent 15 minutes of his farewell address lambasting The Guardian. Dacre, who plainly attended the same performance management training as Philip Green – his staff talk about being dressed-down as being given a “double-cunting” – seems to have limped off the field at a strange time, given the world is tilting more towards his socially illiberal stance with every turn.

But he certainly prevailed over the monthly phone calls of the last twenty years between the Guardian me and the Mail my mom. In the last couple of years alone my mother has railed about a tsunami of Syrian refugees getting preferential treatment; about doctors “they’ve been agitating forever”; about how our young are a bunch of softy do-gooders – “because the teachers are brainwashing them”; and that without the royals, we’d lose gazillions in tourism as Windsor Castle fell into loneliness and disrepair (like, say, The Palace of Versailles). She’d always win these battles. She’d goad me to say equally stupid things, or to put the phone down. A needle stuck in a groove.

The closed-mindedness and the hatred drip, drip, dripped daily into her, corroded her senses and rusted her heart. The truth is, whatever else is our relationship, we no longer like each other very much. Well done Mr Dacre, look on your works ye mighty. In your honour I’ve knocked up a title that honours your way with headlines and truth.

No poetry.

Tuesday 6th November - Appleby, Trump, Egg and Poetry

7/11/2018

60 bets. Out £630.
(Dickie Johnson - three short-priced winners)
Loss on day £175

Yesterday seemed a significant day.

Charlie Appleby trained the first British winner of the Melbourne Cup. Which gave me a spring in my step first thing, as I’d backed him. As you can see that was about as good as the day got.

Egg, aka Rick Grimes, died in The Walking Dead. Or rather, died slowly over the hour but was then whisked off in a helicopter to star in three spin-off films – which seemed like a metaphor for the show itself.

America went to the polling booths to provide a half-time vote of confidence, or not, on old Cunty McCunt face. Which, to my basically uninformed eye, looked to be a relegation six-pointer that predictably ended up as a desperate score draw. Which I guess is progress.

And a line of poetry popped unbidden into my head. This was the first piece of poetry I have channelled/written down all year. I have been keeping the voices at bay by obsessing about gambling and putting the hours in. But, finally, a voice managed to creep through the battle-lines. Not a very good line, admittedly, but I’ll keep a wary ear out.

Always, there’s a place where the wall is higher.

Update May 2018

23/5/2018

A quick update on progress with my new fund. Pootling along, though the last two weeks have been trying. Have paid some small dividends and am in profit. A terrible hourly rate though…

Missed a couple of big pay-outs – the final leg of the accumulator both times looking like winning for at least a few strides, before remembering my wager…

I’ve been recording stats on my records at every course, and in addition my bets on trainers and jockeys (doubles and upwards). Here’s a brief summary of those – I’ll be interested to see how this list compares to one at the end of a year’s betting with my new approach. “Best” means most profitable and “Worst” means lost me most money. Some of my favourite people head the Worst lists!

Best Jumps Courses
Aintree
Cheltenham
Musselburgh
Uttoxeter
Hereford

Worst Jumps Courses
Ludlow
Huntingdon
Sedgefield
Sandown

Best Jumps Trainers
Gordon Elliott
Tom Lacey
Venetia Williams
Donald McCain
Colin Tizzard

Worst Jumps Trainers
Gary Moore
Ben Pauling
Nicky Richards

Best Jumps Jockeys
Harry Cobden
Dickie Johnson

Worst Jumps Jockeys
Brian Hughes

Best Flat Course (early days)
Epsom

Worst Flat Course
Yarmouth

Best AW course
Wolves

Worst AW Course
Kempton

Best Flat Trainers
Jamie Osborne
Pip Hide

Worst Flat Trainers
James Fanshawe
Andrew Balding

Best Flat Jockeys
James Doyle
Silvestre De Sousa

Worst Flat Jockeys
Ryan Moore
Richard Kingscote

Maxime Tissier, Paul Pogba and Patrick Reed

7/4/2018

I had a bad day on the horses. Sundry awfulness, on my part mostly. But not entirely. My bet of the day at Fakenham, the jockey rode out my 10/1 horse for an easy success, whipping him home with verve and gusto.Only problem was they had another lap to go....It was that kinda day, ending up with my escape to glory being beaten in a photo-finish despite trading odds-on to win the photo.

I turned over for the football, somewhat drained. I said to myself on the 40 minute mark, "if City don't finish this now they're gonna regret it. If they don't score a third before half-time I'll lay them at 1:05 and back United at around 66/1." Instead I fell asleep and woke up as Pogba scored.

I rather feel these are runes that my 50/1 Master's bet, Patrick Reed, shouldn't ever, ever be reading..