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GAMBLING
FIVE years ago, I had a £5 each-way flutter on the Grand National — and pocketed a staggering £435.
For a week or so afterwards, I fantasised that this might be evidence of oracular abilities or some inherent luckiness on my part, and contemplated a career change to stay-at-home stockbroking.
But, deep down, I knew my win had been a 66-1 outsider one-off and that books would probably prove a safer bet than hanging out at my High Street bookmakers.
From John Bunyan to James Bond, fiction has abounded in cautionary and seductively glamorous tales of gambling. One of my favourite highstakes players is Becky Sharp, the self-serving anti-heroine of William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair.
To be fair to the scheming Becky, the early odds are stacked against her. A poor orphan whose formative years were spent warding off her bohemian father’s creditors, Becky must live by her wits. She gambles by marrying the card-sharp cavalry officer Rawdon Crawley, then uses her wiles to distract the victims he is fleecing. Time and again, Becky overplays her hand, yet never quite goes bust. The woman has true grift.
‘In order that I exist, two gamblers, one Obsessive, the other Compulsive, must meet,’ reports the narrator of Peter Carey’s Booker Prize-winning novel Oscar And Lucinda. Oscar is a man of the cloth who has his first real epiphany at Epsom racetrack. Lucinda is an awkward heiress who feels liberated at the card table.
Aboard a ship to Australia, she asks him to hear her confession, little expecting his response to her tales of dice and ‘fan-tan’ will be: ‘Where is the sin? Our whole faith is a wager.’
Sin City is many gamblers’ idea of heaven, though I can never shake off the hallucinogenic imagery of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. As Thompson says: ‘We came out here to find the American Dream . . . we’ve found the main nerve.’
He conjures nightmares of the hotel lift swallowing them whole — which gambling can do.
So, enjoy a Grand National flutter, but don’t get suckered in.