One mug punter and the Numbers of Fate!

 Thanks to news.bbc.co.uk

People talk of the past as if it were always better, but sometimes the present is pretty ring-a-ding-ding. On Monday, I was absentmindedly rifling through my wallet, half-heartedly hoping to find an old winning scratch-card or, even though the chances of finding green folding were negligible, a lost crumpled fiver. 
 

Neither were there, yet even better, there were my betting slips from the Cheltenham Festival. Much like yer average bloke, I back horses in big races at famous meetings, so that when we’re all sitting around the tele watching the race, I’ve a real reason to cheer and scream and go a bit mental. Having a flutter also allows me to suddenly sound altogether knowledgeable, offer titbits of advice and talk as if I was reared on horse milk and grass instead of Cow and Gate.
 

Nobody falls for my temporary glut of equine wisdom, because they know that when I made my bets I used what many might consider a less than wholly scientific method.
 

Given enough time and the empty walls of a bookies, I might make an effort to check out if the horse has run the distance before, and if so did he struggle or thrive, pull up or unseat his rider?
 

More often though I attempt to find what I call the Number of Fate. Standing in front of the newspaper sheet showing the runners and riders on the bookies wall, my eyes drift towards the numbers on the far left, showing where each horse has been placed in their recent races. A favourite might look a bit 1143-221, while your outsider maybe more 6435FP-4.
 

Summoning the spirits of Bacchus, Arthur Daley and Del Boy, I drift into a trance, my vision blurring as I scan my eyes up and down and along those little lists of each horse’s numbers, imagining which sequence will continue with a 1.
 

Eat your heart out Einstein. Put that where the Wonders of the Universe don’t shine, Dr. Brian Cox.
 

I’m what in betting circles is generally referred to as a ‘Mug Punter’ or ‘Bookies Friend’. By investing only 5 quid each way, I feel free to flutter on the 20/1 shots. I’m paying to play; buying a thrill; so I want the chance of a big return, and the fact that my horse is considered unlikely to win makes those rare victories taste so sweet.
 

Mug Punter. The Bookies Friend. That’s me all over.
 

There were three betting slips hiding in the lonely folds of my wallet, with returns on two, so I threw away the losing one and headed down to Paddy Power.
Five minutes after my arrival at the bookies I cannot believe my stupidity. I’ve searched my wallet ten times, my coat pocket, my jeans pockets and the vacant car park that was once my brain, but all I can find is the lesser of the two winning slips and the losing slip. I must have thrown away the most lucrative one and kept the worthless little scrap of paper idiot idiot can’t believe you’ve done that Adley you idiot idiot bloody idiot.
 

When I’ve told this story to younger or more frequent gamblers than myself, they fail to understand why I thought it was a problem, but I’m still partly informed by the world in which I grew up. In 70s and 80s London, if I walked into a bookies and said
“You’ll never guess what! I’ve been really silly! I’ve only gone and bloomin’ thrown away my winning betting slip!”
they’d turf me out of the shop on my legs yelling
“Yeh, and so ‘ave all those other blokes standing over there by that bus stop, so go and join the bloody queue!”
Or something a lot less polite and printable.
 

But this is the 21st Century and I live in the West of Ireland, so I approached the counter feeling like a complete chancer, expecting no positive outcome as I related my wee tale of woe to Alan behind the counter.
 

“You have the other slip?”
“I do, and all the bets were made in this place at the same time, if that helps.”
“Sure, so we can do a search!” said my newly-christened ‘Employee of the Millennium’.
 

After a few seconds of fiddling with his computer, Alan magically produced a printed copy of my missing winning slip. He asked me to sign it and fill out a duplicate slip, which I did as I thanked him profusely, not merely for finding my money, which was exceedingly welcome, but also for giving a damn, for being human and sensing I wasn’t trying it on.
 

I suppose if I had been scamming, I’d have aimed a little higher with the payoff. 

“I reckon it’s only about 15 quid.” I said.
“More than that!” said Alan, counting out over 25 euros and handing them to me.
 

I swear, sometimes it helps to be a little on the slow side. I’d made my estimate on the winning odds alone, forgetting completely the winning portion of the each way bet, so I was even happier, and if not substantially richer, slightly less poor than I’d been expecting.
 

Back in the 80s when I’d frequent a well-dodgy bookies just off London’s Portobello Road, the chances of getting any money back on a lost slip on the Cheltenham Gold Cup would’ve been 10,000/1. It would have entailed someone physically going through hundreds if not thousands of betting slips, in the hope of finding mine. More, it would also have taken a shift in the mindset of the urban Englishman akin to the coast of California turning up in Japan.
 

Thankfully, today we have the technology that enables such trifling matters to be resolved happily, and people in Galway who still share that humanity so special to the West of Ireland.
 

As I thanked Alan one more time, a customer behind me muttered

“Better in your pocket than Paddy’s!”  

“Now that's the truth!” said I, at which we all grunted, smiled and went our separate ways.
 

Hoteliers of Ireland - remove your plastic sheets!

After a few minutes lying on my hotel bed in Clifden, I started pouring sweat from all over my body. 

Ooerr. Not nice.

Maybe I’d overdone the delivery of toxins into my body. 

Maybe I’d drunk too much alcohol too quickly in too short a space of time. 

Maybe I’d failed yet again to escape from the craic that is Race Week.

Each year I decide whether I’m going to embrace the 7 crazy days Galway plays host to the entire nation. Where the Galway Races are concerned, you have to be either immersed in it or run away from it. There is no happy medium.

This year I fled, heading off across the sea to inis Mor, to spend some time with Soldier Boy. The last time I went to visit him I brought with me Grumpy Chef and another friend who had recently been through a major trauma. 

Reliable as ever, Soldier Boy delivered a splendidly mad time for all of us, cramming as many macabre and bizarre experiences into our first 40 minutes on the island as the Universe might provide, should it conspire to do its deadly best.

I’ll spare you the details of that true yet highly unbelievable story and instead just share the ingredients: a very hungover ex-soldier covered from head to foot in freshly-ripped flesh wounds; a mobile phone that barked like a dog; a savoy cabbage; several bottles of wine, some bacon and a steep corner on a bohreen by a stone wall, eight foot above a hundred yards of tightly-packed bramble bushes.

As the Americans so quaintly put it: ‘Go figure.’

This time it was going to be different, calm, quiet, just me and my mate sitting outside his gaff for hours under cloudy skies, looking down on the small harbour town of Kilronan.

Off the boat, it felt natural to fall into and out of a few pubs, and then polish off a few tinnies outside his home. Then we strolled back into town in the evening for few more and then a couple or three by the side of his fire pit, under the stars in the evening, talking gentle bollocks into the early hours.

It was one of those days when you hardly noticed how much ye’d been imbibing, but a flow of beer as steady as the rain that falls on da Wesht was delivered into my bloodstream, so it was only when I stood up that I realised I was exceedingly drunk. 

Mind you, sitting down had not been easy either. As soon as I lowered my substantial frame into one of Soldier Boy’s Director-style chairs on his deck, it slowly and wholly disintegrated, sinking beneath me like a lift in an elevator shaft towards the ground, very much as an ex-chair might. Sorry about that, mate!

Next morning we both awoke with sunburned faces, rigid and peeling. Despite the fact that we looked like a pair of grated beetroots, nobody seemed too troubled. In fact, everywhere we went to eat and drink the service was great and delivered with a smile. But sadly the recession was hitting hard, and at 8:30 on a July evening, when the pubs in Kilronan should have been kickin’ major tourist butt, there was myself and himself in Joe Macs, a table of Yanks visiting their family and a few locals at the bar. The place was deader than dead, and if it was like that in high season, gord help the people of the Arann islands.

Mind you they’ve seen worse times, and doubtless will yet again. 

The next day it felt great to turn Shaaanny car left at the crossroads after Rossaveal, heading west for Clifden. I’d forgotten just how mouth-wateringly beautiful is the road that cuts through Roundstone bog. Stopping the car, I stepped out into the sounds of the silence of a Connemara day. 

The wisssshh and shusshhh of the breeze; the gurgle of the streams running off the bog; the fwwwummm fwwwummmm sound of a ...  oh thank you thank you Universe ... a single black swan in flight, cutting low and magnificent across the face of the distant hills.

My hills - the Twelve Pins, God’s own fruit bowl, sensual peaks and swirly valleys smoothed by glaciers, looking perfectly majestic and commanding in a comfortably moderate Irish way. 

My good friend The Goat had been called off to play in Tully Cross, so upon arriving in Clifden I checked into the Alcock and Brown Hotel, where new owner Mike was just the right side of incredibly enthusiastic, managing to resist the temptation to ask me if I’d recently walked through a forest fire, or did my scarlet scabby face always look like that?

I headed straight to the bar in Terry’s, for a pint of Guinness and some excellent fish and chips, but despite the time of year and the exceptionally friendly and efficient staff, the place was empty. I’d expected the posher places to be suffering, but thought that the capital of Connemara’s pub grub would be hitting the high season tourists’ bellies aplenty, but no. All the crowds I’d seen that afternoon had been day trippers, now disappeared, leaving four French tourists to wander disconsolate, looking bored and hard-done by as only the French can.

D’Arcy’s was closed and Malarkey’s was empty. It was just too early for the locals to be out in Clifden, so I took my sandpapered face off on a Stations of the Triangle Tour. Into Griffins to watch some sport, then to Vaughans to sup a few whiskies, then into Lowry’s to talk to a fisherman or two and drink some more black, and back to Terry’s for a couple more, followed by another excursion to Malarkey’s.

By the time dusk had fallen, I was quietly and privately bombed, so tired and weary I fell upon the bed in my hotel room, to read my book and grab an early night.

All was fine.

Well, no, all was not  fine. I felt sweaty. All of a sudden I felt yuckysweatyhorrible and pooper, please tell me I’m not coming down with something!

No. I wasn’t ill, I was just lying on a plastic bottom sheet. What a vile and patronising practice that is. Hotel rooms are not cheap, and if you’re a hotelier you simply have to treat your guests with respect. We’re paying handsomely precisely for a good night’s sleep in a bed we don’t have to make ourselves, and yet, there I was, having to strip the bed entirely, remove the wretched sweat-inducing placcy precautionary device and remake the bed from top to bottom. 

Instead of feeling all special and mollycoddled, I now resented having to pay to sleep in that bed. It was no longer an object of comfort and luxury. 

Hoteliers of Ireland, stop treating your punters like 6 year-old bed-wetters. Take off your plastic sheets and help the tourists feel at least as comfy as they do in their own beds. Otherwise they will day trip and go home.

Next year I think my liver and I will stay home for Race Week. I’ll just give in, let it eat me up and burp me out.