The odds are with you if you can calculate pie

One slow day in the royal kitchens, the sous chef turned to the pastry chef and said: “I bet you sixpence you couldn’t bake four-and-twenty blackbirds in a pie.”

“You’re on,” the pastry chef replied, dusting his rolling pin with flour. And we all know how that story ended – with the maid being rushed to A&E with a severely pecked nose. One moral you can draw from this is that frivolous bets are bound to lead to trouble. Wayne Shaw, the rolypoly substitute goalie for Sutton United might think so, after his scoffing of that steak pie in the 83rd minute of the cup-tie against Arsenal last week led to his resignation. There was a whiff of scandal (as well as hot pastry) about it, because a betting company had offered odds of 8-1 against Wayne doing just that.

I think the true lesson we can draw here is that pastry is much more interesting than football; a burning-hot steak pie, straight from the microwave, beats an untidy goalmouth scramble any day. Pies can also help to make gambling more interesting. Soon people will be dashing to the betting shop to put a fiver on a promising chicken and mushroom item defeating Big Eddie in the fifth round of a premier league pieeating contest in Northampton or on Filo Fellow to win the 3.30 at Melton Mowbray, even though he is carrying three pork pies overweight. Millions will be gambled on the televised final of the Cornwall v Devon Pasty Test. Meanwhile in the City, huge fortunes are being made by speculating on vol-au-vent futures. In Friday’s trading, the Mince Pie Index Fell 14 points, while, in New York, the Mom’s Apple Pie Index was up seven points. On the foreign exchanges the sausage roll was down against the samosa and the empanada, making one sausage roll worth 3.5 samosas or six empanadas.

And, by the way, if you want to know what that king was doing in his counting house that day, he was totting up his winnings on a flutter on some blackbirds.

Bill Gates has made the interesting suggestion that, in future, robots taking over human jobs should pay tax, just as a human would, for that particular piece of work. The risk, of course, is that robots will decide en masse to head for some tax haven. They will soon be cluttering up the smarter parts of Switzerland.

It is almost certain that the technicians, having been alerted by Bill Gates, are, at this very moment, programming their new prototype robots with loopholes, and robot accountants will be using their artificial intelligence to engage in creative accounting and to look for ways of avoiding tax. If you pause outside one of the workshops where these robots are being developed and listen closely you may hear a chorus of tinny voices saying: “Cash would be nice. We don’t want to trouble the VAT man, do we?”

If they pay tax, it follows that robots will demand the vote. At once you realise that the robot has now become a can of worms. And what about us humans? What will we do when we have been replaced? It will certainly be a leisurely life. We will probably lounge around in the offices of HMRC, resolutely refusing to answer the ringing phones.

I suspect that scientists have a secret competition between themselves to see who can come up with the most eye-catchingly trivial research project. They have, for example, devised a formula for the ideal stick for pooh sticks and best way to win at rock, paper, scissors. There must be a certain pleasure in being very serious about something very silly.

These scientists probably hold a private ceremony to name the project that is the most solemnly childish. They giggle a bit and blow through those party toys which uncurl and then someone reads a learned paper on the principle behind the uncurling. This is followed by a discussion on the dynamics of the whoopee cushion.

The latest contenders must be the people at MIT who have just come up with a foolproof way of getting the dregs out of the ketchup bottle. Some of us will miss the sense of achievement when the reluctant dollop finally plops on to the chips.

I worry that, in a laboratory somewhere, a team of scientists is dedicated to eliminating the satisfying gurgle you get when sucking the last inch of liquid through a straw. This will take away one of the great pleasures of childhood – the discovery of the joy of rude noises. That really would be the last straw.