29. Mistaken Identity

In the years before I retired I had thought little about what I would do with all the free time that I suddenly would have.  On the day that Caroline rang me at work and asked how I felt about living in the Cayman Islands, I thought that retirement was still at least two years away.  Five months later my life had taken an enormous change and I was a man of leisure living on a tropical island.

After about a year of living an idyllic, lazy life of complete self-indulgence, Caroline began nagging me (no, I’ll be nice – urging me) to help in any way I could at our local Infant/Primary School on a voluntary basis.  I was a retired, qualified, experienced teacher who had been cleared in the UK in a number of checks designed to keep perverts and dodgy characters out of schools and away from children.  (That’s important. Remember it!)  She thought that I had a lot to offer and a school could benefit from my experience.  Early in September 2009 I arrived, a little apprehensive, for my first day.

At 8:35 I was taken into the assembly hall where 320 smiling children chanted.  “Good morning Mr Terry,” in the way children do there and everywhere.

The first week was interesting.  I had never been in a school with children younger than eleven before and I had a number of new and mostly enjoyable experiences.  They ranged from the look of disbelief on the face of a very perceptive 8-year-old girl who said, “You can’t be.  You look too young,” when I answered her question about how old I am, to the look of haughty disdain I was given by a 10-year-old girl when I asked her if she knew what ‘similar’ meant.  The lowest point came on Thursday when I felt pressure on my arm and looked down to see a 4-year-old boy wiping his very runny nose on my sleeve.

I went home on at the end of the week feeling I had done a good job and had possibly “made a difference.”

Something happened on the Saturday morning that spoilt everything.  All she had to say was, “short, fat, white, old and ugly” and they would have got me.  There are only 55,000 of us on island. Take away women and children, black men, slim men, average and tall men, good-looking men and any man under 55 and who are you left with?  My neighbour, Bernard and me. Unfortunately, he was in the UK at the time and as he’s got a really bad stammer, he wouldn’t have deflected interest away from me for very long anyway.

That Saturday morning, I was on my own in the supermarket.  Caroline was too busy to come. She was playing Bejewelled Blitz on Facebook. I was slowly pushing a trolley around when a very pretty little girl aged about eight, stepped in front of me, gave me a huge, genuine, beaming smile and said, 

“Hello Mr Terry.” 

I did not recognise her but I realised that she was a pupil to who had seen me at school.

“Hello,” I said. 

She carried on smiling at me but said nothing.  She was obviously expecting me to say something, so I said, “It’s hot today isn’t it?”

She mumbled something like, “Yes, it is.”  The smile was slipping from her face and looking a little disappointed, she said, ”Bye” and wandered off.

I felt pretty bad and told myself that I should have made more of an effort to talk to her. All was not lost, however, because a few minutes later I saw her on tiptoes bending over the frozen food compartment studying a packet of broccoli.  I went over to her.

“What’s your name?” I asked breezily, with the friendliest smile I could muster.

She stood up straight and said, “Keela.”

“Hello Keela.” I said. “Do you live near here?”

She flung the broccoli back into the freezer and ran off down the aisle.  I was not surprised because I realised immediately why - it was a different girl! 

I was terrified. What should I do? Should I find the manager and tell him I’d made a little mistake or stand there and wait for the sirens to start and the doors to self- lock?

I did neither but finished the shopping and went home. I was greeted by a very happy Caroline who told me she had some great news. “Good,” I thought. “I need some.”

She had set a personal best score of 317,300.

28. Half way?

I am not a deep thinker.  I don’t remember when I first realised it but thinking too deeply about anything is rarely a good idea.  I am a “glass half empty” kind of person too.  

In any situation, I imagine what is the worst-case scenario and then work out strategies to cope with it.  If the worst-case doesn’t happen (and it hardly ever does), everything is a lot better than just all right.

I was thinking about my father the other day and I remembered something that he had once said to me, and it started me thinking.  You may find it a little morbid but it interests me.

When I was 19, my Mum and Dad, my girlfriend and I went on holiday across Europe to Yugoslavia and Greece.  I remember being on the beach with my Dad at Zadar in Croatia when he said something about being more than halfway through his life.  The date was August 10th, 1966.  

Dad was born on September 22nd, 1923 and so on that day, he was 15,664 days old.  He died on July 28^tth, 1993 having lived for a total of 25,513 days.  So, he was right.  In fact, he had lived through 59.67% of his life.

(Yes, I know!  What kind of nerd works out that sort of thing?) 

I have wondered since, what my Dad was doing on the day that was exactly halfway through his life.  I have worked out that it would have been on August 25th, 1958.  It was a Monday and just less than a month before his 35th birthday.  I was eleven and a pupil at the school where he taught physics.  Peter, my brother was nine.  

We spent that summer in Lowestoft and didn’t have a family holiday.  We rarely did.  Lowestoft’s north beach was better than any French, Spanish or Italian beach and that’s where we went almost every day in August.

I can’t remember when I first realised that I was more than halfway through my life.  I still find it hard to accept that I am and only last week I was trying to persuade Caroline that my 111th birthday party should be particularly spectacular - much grander even than my 110th.  

The only thing that I remember from reading ‘The Lord of the Rings when I was 12, is the name of Gandalf’s horse (often useful in a pub quiz) and that the book begins with Bilbo Baggins’ “eleventy first” birthday.

I think that twice in my life have I come near to death.  The first time was when I was riding on my motor scooter in Durham City in June 1968.  In those days, Durham University was very popular with public school students who had failed to get into Oxford or Cambridge. 

Durham’s narrow streets were choked with the Morgans, Lotuses, Healey 3000s, MGs and at least one Marcos, bought for some of the more privileged students by their parents.  I had a ten-year-old Lambretta 125D motor scooter that I had bought for £25 with the money that I had earned from my summer vacation job with the Birds Eye frozen food factory in Lowestoft.  

Working 12-hour shifts on Quality Control (no skill or training required), I could earn as much as £95 a week.  To give you some idea of how good the pay was, in September 1969, my first ever monthly paycheque for teaching was £61.

Working on Quality Control at Birds Eye was a doddle.  The shift was from 6 until 6, day or night.  Sometimes my task was to put a sample of peas through a machine called a "tenderometer" to work out whether the crop was ready to harvest or not.  The samples would arrive from the fields in dribs and drabs but I was paid whether I was busy or not.  Some night shifts were very slow.

Occasionally, I would assess the quality of the work done by women on the production line but the women whose output quality I was controlling, either worked 7:30 am until 4:30 pm or from 10:00 pm until 6:00 am.  That meant that every working day or night I had lots of free time.  

I learnt loads of useful things during that time like how to play bridge and cribbage and from Stan, a 55-year-old full time, permanent employee, I was told of a foolproof way (he said) to chat-up women.  “It usually works,” he said, “and if it doesn’t, you’ve saved a lot of time and money pissing about!” 

One night, I was controlling quality as usual, when things took a nasty turn.  I was in a large, isolated shed and inside there were three parallel conveyor belts.  There were 20 women seated on each side of every belt and so there were 120 women in the room - and me.  They were the last check before the peas disappeared to be frozen and then dropped into 4 oz packets.  

As the zillions of peas passed them, the women removed extraneous vegetable matter (EVM) of which stalks and daisy heads were the most common.  Whatever got past the women went into a packet and was frozen minutes later. 

My job was to take random sealed packets as they came off the line before they went into the freezer, open them, spread the contents on to a tray and check for EVM.  I filled in a form tabulating my findings and then I analysed the results.  If too much EVM was found, the line was stopped and all the peas that the women had checked went through the line a second time.  If a batch had to be rechecked the women lost bonus pay.  

One night, at about two in the morning, I warned the shop steward that I was finding a lot of EVM.  
“No, you’re not!” she said emphatically and walked off.

Half an hour later the line stopped and 120 women glared at me in a way that I had never experienced before.  They sat in sullen silence for about twenty minutes and then the peas started to come through again.  

At 4:00 a.m. the line was stopped again.  I was in my work area sifting through a tray of peas.  I suddenly became aware that I was not alone. I looked up to see eight women - big women - including the shop steward, surrounding me.

Not a word was said.  They lifted me from my seat and carried me into an adjacent office.  Resistance was futile as any one of them could have probably manhandled me on her own and within a minute they had completely removed my overalls and my clothes.  Then, they left, taking all my clothes with them.  

As they went out into the main body of the shed there were huge cheers and much applause.  One of them was waving my underpants around her head.

Anyway, my first dice with death came on Elvet Bridge in Durham City in June 1968.  Final exams were over and I was crossing the bridge, helmetless on my scooter, rushing to get from one pub to another.  A bus had stopped ahead of me and I overtook it as another bus was coming towards me.  

As that bus approached, a dog ran across the road and the bus driver swerved to avoid it.  (Don’t say he got his priorities right!).  My right shoulder and elbow were scraped along the bus’s entire length but I just managed to stay upright and alive.

My second close call came on the day that I had my liver transplant - October 6th, 2008.  I remember lying on my back on the table in the operating theatre.  I was a little drowsy but I was completely aware of what was going on.  I was somewhat apprehensive and I knew that ‘this was it’.  A man in a surgical gown, wearing a mask came over and introduced himself to me as my anaesthetist.  

“How long will all this take?” I asked him.

“Why do you want to know?”

“I’m just curious,” I said.

“Don’t worry about that,” he said.  “If you wake up, it won’t matter how long it took and if you don’t wake up - you’ll be dead!”

Of course, I don’t know when my ‘halfway day’ actually was but I rather hope that it was then.  You’re all invited to my eleventy-first birthday party.  Make a note!  February 8th, 2058.  It’s a Friday.  

Make a long weekend of it and please don’t buy me socks.  I want a jet pack or a single-seat, anti-gravity, long-range hopper. 

 

 

27. Seasons

Time zones take a bit of getting used to.  There is no daylight saving in Cayman and so we were five hours behind the UK in the winter but six hours behind in the summer when the UK and North America put their clocks forward one hour. 

I received an e-mail from David this morning telling me that I hadn't told him of my new phone number.  At noon today, when it was early evening in the UK, I rang him from my new phone but he didn't answer.  

I don't know his cell phone number and I seriously doubt that he has one, as the technology is way beyond his level of competence but I do have Penny's, his wife's, number and so I rang that.

"Yes!" she said, sounding not the least bit welcoming.

"Hiya Pen," I said cheerily, "How are you doing?"

She hung up on me but not before managing to say, "We're in San Francisco and it's four in the morning."

********

We arrived back in England ten days ago with the temperature in London in the high twenties.  It felt rather like it had in Cayman the day before but it was much more pleasant – really!  I suppose that was due to the lower humidity levels.  

In Cayman surrounded by a hot sea, the relative humidity is always at least 80%. This means that when you sweat (and yes, I do, even though Caroline doesn’t) the moisture is slow to evaporate from your body and sweating does not cool you down as quickly as you would like. 

Today in London the temperature is 15°C and it is almost chilly.  Autumn is still some two or three months away.  Here, in maritime Western Europe, we experience daily fluctuations in temperature and importantly, we have seasons.

We had several fruit trees on the grounds of the complex where we lived in Cayman.  There were coconuts, mangoes, bananas, papaya, sour sap, breadfruit, almonds and others that I didn’t recognise.  

The land area there was common to all and even the rather splendid mango that grew only four feet from our kitchen window did not belong to us but to everybody. It’s true that if one of the other residents came and started harvesting ‘our’ tree, I would give him or her a look and might make some comment but they had as much right to the fruit as I did.

Huck and his friend tried to make money a couple of years ago by taking coconuts door-to-door and offering them at $2 each. 

“Two dollars?” I said.  “Why should I pay you two dollars?  They’re my coconuts.”

“Because they’re special,” said Huck.

I walked ten feet to where two coconuts lay on the ground having recently fallen from the tree.  

“As special as this one?” I asked, offering it to them.

Two palm trees, ten feet apart, might appear to be perfect for rigging up a hammock and spending a wonderfully relaxing afternoon, dozing in the shade with a cooling breeze making things idyllic.  Don’t ever do it!  A five-pound coconut falling twenty feet or more is literally lethal.  

One of our neighbours had a top of the range Lexus.  He loved that car and was seen polishing and caressing it most evenings and all of the weekends.  He never used his designated parking space which is forty yards from his door but he always parked overnight right outside his front door, six feet from a very tall palm tree.  One night the inevitable happened and a dent the size of a football appeared in his bonnet. 

Coconuts seem to be in season all year but other fruits are not.  Mango season is May/July and our almond tree began to drop its fruit in late September.  The Poinciana trees with the beautiful red flowers that line both sides of the main road eastward from our house for a couple of miles, begin their breathtaking display in late May and finish by September

All of this is very confusing for an ex-geography teacher who for nearly forty years, told generation after generation of students that there are no seasons in the tropics other than the wet and dry ones.  

Since living here, I have found that the different rainfall amounts are really just relative to each other.  A torrential thunderstorm can take place in any month.  Certainly, May to November is wetter than December to April but rainfall total differences are not as marked as the difference between winter and summer rain in Mediterranean regions.  

Temperatures only vary by about 3°C from the warmest to the coolest months so why then do some of the plants behave as if they are growing in Bournemouth?  

Mention of Bournemouth, reminds me of an occasion a few years ago when we were staying there while Caroline attended a conference.  One morning, when she got back from jogging (no further comment) she was almost incoherent; not because she was exhausted but because she was giggling so much.  On her run she had passed a signpost to, “The Lower Pleasure Gardens.”

I also used to tell the students that in the tropics, the ground was heated by the almost overhead sun; the air in contact with the ground was heated; the warm air expanded; the air was therefore less dense than the surrounding air; the warm air rose and as it rose, it expanded and became cooler; as it cooled the relative humidity became higher and once 100% humidity had been reached, further cooling resulted in condensation; clouds formed; rain fell. 

This meant that rain fell every afternoon at around 2 p.m.  What a load of bollocks!

Sure, it often rains in the early afternoon but it seems to be just as likely to rain in the early morning or even in the middle of the night.  Maybe things are different in Brazil.

One thing I did teach correctly was about the buttress roots that some of the trees have.  I had read about them, talked about them and drawn diagrams of them but I had never seen them until I came here.  They are wonderful, impressive and magnificent. 

A couple of years ago, I was talking to Bernard who unofficially acts as the Strata Manager for this complex and I suggested to him that we should consider harvesting all the fruits and nuts that we produce and sell them to the supermarkets. The income generated would keep our Strata fees down.  His response was non-committal and I assumed that he thought the idea wasn’t feasible.

I was delighted therefore when, a couple of weeks later, a truck pulled up next to our cottage and three men got out, put up a couple of ladders and began to harvest the mangoes.  “So, I was talking sense after all,” I thought. 

It was a swelteringly hot day and they worked hard, filling basket after basket. When they had stripped ‘our’ tree they moved on to the next one about fifteen feet away.  At about 12:30 as the day was getting even hotter, I made up a tray of ice cold drinks and took them out to them.  They were very grateful but they all asked if they could have a cold beer instead.

They tipped out the fruit squash and handed me their glasses.  I rinsed the glasses and poured them non-alcoholic beers. They didn’t realise what I’d given them and drank them without comment, although one of them did grumble that he’d have preferred it in the bottle.  The four of us sat in the shade, drinking and chatting for about ten minutes. I felt a little guilty delaying them and so after apologising for doing so, I collected the glasses and took them inside.  

They finished for the day at about four in the afternoon and their truck was laden down with mangoes and coconuts.  As they passed my window on their way home, they peeped on the horn, waved at me and went.

About a week later I saw Bernard again.

“How much did we make?” I asked him.

“What do you mean?” 

“The mangoes and the coconuts.  What did we get for them?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, looking at me as though I was a little disturbed.

THE THIEVING BASTARDS! 

26. Sushi Day

This is strange.  I am sitting in a room at The Belfry Hotel, somewhere near Birmingham, Warwickshire, UK - not Alabama, USA.  

Our flight from Cayman on Tuesday this week was cancelled and we didn’t arrive at Heathrow until 11:45 on Thursday morning.  We spent part of that afternoon getting essentials like UK cell phones (I must try to start calling them ‘mobiles’) and then on Friday, we morning drove up the M1/M6 to a part of England that I don’t know very well. 

We are here for a reunion.  In 1991, for the first time since we graduated in 1968, 16 of us who were friends in the same year at Hatfield College, Durham University, met to recall the past - those days when we had few worries and no responsibilities - and caught up with new happenings.  

Every few years since then, we have come together at various locations around England and done it all again.  At first it was just us blokes but then wives and partners were invited.  This upset one or two of the originals and they haven’t been again; neither, since 2001 sadly, has the only one of us who, so far, has died.  

Attendists / attenders / attendants / attendees / attendingers vary every time and we have met about six times since 1991.   I missed the last one as I was having my liver transplanted.  I’ve been told that they all had several drinks in my honour, which doesn’t seem very appropriate somehow.  This time there are twelve of us, plus wives and partners.

All of us married, six of us more than once.  We all seem to be pretty happy and so that is, I suppose, an indication that all of us have been successful.  One of us makes the Sunday Times Rich List every year and one of us is well known in the entertainment industry but the rest of us just lead normal and unexceptional lives.  

None of them will read this today as they will all have stinking hangovers, recovering from Saturday night, but I must be prepared for some kind of reaction and response the next time I meet them.  That will probably be in the summer of 2015, which will mark 50 years since we all first got to know each other. 

We’ve all retired now but for two days and nights we behave as if we were 21 again.  It’s not sad!  It’s really good fun.

We’re at The Belfry because of its golf course.  I don’t play golf but most of the others do.  I’d like to and I always intended to take it up but I don’t think now that I ever will as my hip and knees will probably stop any kind of a free swing of the club.  Perhaps Caroline will and I can caddy for her.

Anyway, I wrote what follows a couple of months ago when both Caroline and I had bad days; she, because of problems at work; me because I couldn’t find the Branston pickle to put in my cheese sandwich.  

“Sushi Day?” I asked her.

“Possibly,” she said, “Too soon to tell.”

We sat on the porch as the sun was setting over the coral reef, comparing notes and talking about what factors have to be in place to make for a really bad day.

Have you had yours yet?   I hope that I’ve had mine but the trouble with your Sushi Day is that for all you know it’s still to come.  

Mine was not the day I collapsed unconscious with what proved to be terminal liver disease, nor was it the day that I was told that that was what I had.  My Sushi Day was December 15th 1967.  I hope that was when it was, but that’s the trouble with your Sushi Day, you never know.  It could be today - or tomorrow!

About 35 years ago, an 18-year-old Pakistani came to England to try to make his way into professional cricket.  His name was Sushi.  He was a very good batsman indeed and played many times for Middlesex 2nd XI.  

At weekends Sushi played for my club, Finchley.  He could speak good, understandable English but his English reading skills were weak.  One Sunday, he was selected to play in a friendly match against Hitchin CC.  I was the captain of the Finchley team. 

The game was away at Hitchin and scheduled to start at 11.30 a.m.  Hitchin is about 25 miles north of Finchley and Sushi and the others were told to be at the club at 10.00 am.  He had no car and had to go everywhere by bus or tube.  

Ten of us, as well as the umpire and scorer, were there by 10.15 but Sushi was not.  We phoned his flat but got no reply and so we assumed that he was on his way. We waited, but at 10.30 we gave up and we set off in a convoy of 3 or 4 cars.  Remember these were the days when mobile/cell phones were very rare and virtually unheard of. Interesting fact #1  – the first-ever mobile phone call in Britain was made in 1973.

When we got to Hitchin I phoned the club and was told that Sushi had arrived 5 minutes after we had all left and that he had been directed to the Green Line bus stop.  I was told that he should be with us within an hour.

That’s OK I thought.  If I win the toss, we’ll bat first and Sushi can be the next man in whenever he arrives.  Instead of opening, he can bat at 3,4,5 or 6.  Importantly, when it is our turn to field, we’ll have 9 fielders.  Interesting fact #2 – a bowler, wicket keeper and only 8 fielders represents a 9.1% reduction in fielding strength but does, in fact, amount to a 19.7% reduction in fielding efficiency. These figures are based on my own research so don’t argue.

I lost the toss and we had to field.  It was only my wonderful man-management skills and my innate cricket expertise that kept their score to just below 300.  

As their innings ended at about four o’clock, Sushi arrived on the ground.  Everyone, except me, welcomed him warmly but even I had to warm a little towards him when I heard why he was nearly five hours late. 

He’d caught a Green Line bus and got off at the terminus.  Then he walked nearly two miles to the ground carrying a very heavy kit bag containing his cricket boots, pads and two bats.  Interesting fact #3 – in club cricket, any player who always carries two bats must be a good player. 

He arrived only to discover that he was at the right ground but two months too early.  He was at Hemel Hempstead CC and Finchley didn’t play there until September.  

The destination on the front of the bus began with an ‘H’ and he thought, poor reader of English that he was, that this was the right one.  He then had to walk, carrying his heavy kit, nearly two miles back to the terminus and this time, after a very long wait, he caught the right bus to Hitchin.  

Then, he had a one-mile walk uphill, carrying his very heavy kit to where we were playing.  Instead of playing cricket, he’d had a 5-mile slog, just like the sort of exercise the SAS do.

“OK,” I said to him, “where do you want to bat? 

“Open,” he replied. 

“Are you sure?” I asked him,  “You must be very tired. Why not have a rest for half an hour?”  

“Open,” he insisted. So, he did. 

He faced the first ball of our innings.  He raised his bat to leave the ball but he had totally misjudged the line and his off-stump went cartwheeling away - out first ball.  

His walk back to the pavilion was so slow that before he reached it, his successor had received and also got out to the first ball that he received.  

So, for possibly the first and probably the last time in the history of cricket, two batsmen were trudging off the pitch at the same time.  One was 40 yards behind the other and they’d both been out first ball.  Finchley 0 – 2 after two balls and Hitchin’s opening bowler was on a hat trick.

We won the game by 3 wickets despite having been 0 - 2.  It was mainly thanks to a wonderful innings of 110 by the captain batting at no. 5 who I always thought was a much better player than everyone else did.  Interesting fact #4 –  they were probably right.

When I was out – diddled by Sam the umpire - 2 hours later, I returned to the pavilion to find Sushi, sitting with his head in his hands staring miserably at the ground and still wearing his pads. I sat next to him and began to unbuckle my pads. “Are you all right?”  I asked gently.  

He turned his head to look at me.  His eyes were moist.  When he spoke it was with anger, despair, misery and sorrow:

“Worst Day, Whole Life.” 

So, a “Sushi Day” is the worst day of your whole life.  It could be today!

25. Romany King and dashed hopes

This morning, while emptying things for packing, I found a small, hard covered notebook in a drawer.  Five years ago, in October 2005, Caroline had used it to list what we needed to do after arriving in Cayman. 

I saw this on page 2:

Get mobile phone

Buy car

Find flat

Fix utilities

Register with doctor

Get married

Buy snorkel and mask

Three months later they were all crossed off.

Every Saturday evening, since the middle of January, I have sat in my chair and posted this blog.  As you may have come to realise, we don’t have an exciting, full social life.  This is the last one that I will post from Cayman because tomorrow we leave our little seaside cottage and move into the Marriott for two days before we fly home on Tuesday afternoon.  

Once my reservoir is empty, I may stop blogging.  It won’t be the same when I’m sitting in a small room in North London as sitting here on my porch, watching and listening to the Caribbean Sea while being entertained by parrots.

*************

We had an earthquake in Grand Cayman on January 19^th.  At 9:23 a.m. I was in my recliner reading the online newspaper when the chair started to shake.   The shaking became stronger very quickly and it seemed to be accompanied by a noise but I think now that I probably imagined that.   That was it.  It was all over in five or six seconds.   

I sent an e-mail to my friends telling them that I had just experienced my first ever earthquake and then I went back to reading the paper.

I started to receive messages asking if we were OK.  My elder daughter rang to ask if the house was damaged.  (No comment!)  I found out later that the earthquake was of magnitude 5.9.

The next day I was speaking by Skype to a friend in England and she said that as we are only 600 miles from Haiti, which had experienced a magnitude 7 only a week before with widespread destruction, we were lucky.  

“It doesn’t work like that,” I told her.  As the Richter scale is logarithmic, a 7 is ten times more powerful than a 6 and a hundred times more powerful than a 5.  Ours had only been quite small.

“Not large,” she said, “but significant.”    

Now when had I heard that before?

*************

I was at university with Nigel who follows horse racing even more closely than I follow football, rugby or cricket.  It isn’t the gambling that grips him but everything to do with the process.   He seems to get much more satisfaction from backing a horse at 25/1 that later comes second at a starting price of 2/1, than he does by backing a 2/1 winner.  In his mind ‘beating the book’ seems to be everything.

He rarely gives tips to me but when he does they are always worth acting upon. His first ever advice came in 1968 while we were still students.   

“If you’ve got a fiver, put it on Sir Ivor,” was the phrase that echoed around college in the weeks prior to the Derby.   We all did and it won but at a starting price of 6/4, it was hardly a great coup.

In 1973 he told me that a horse called Red Rum looked good.   On a Saturday afternoon in March I was playing rugby.   I came off the ground at the end of the game to hear that Red Rum had won the National at odds of 9/1. 

Ante post betting means backing a horse before the day of the race.  When betting starts, some months before a big race, horse Y may be available to back at 20/1.   If Y then convincingly wins a minor race, its odds for the big race may be slashed considerably.  Conversely, if it performs poorly the odds may go out to say, 25/1.   If a horse you back at 25/1 subsequently wins at 3/1, you are paid at the longer odds.  One of the dangers of ante post betting is that if the horse is withdrawn from the race for any reason at all, you lose all your stake money.   

I am not an ante post gambler and so I only backed Red Rum on the morning of the race and won £60.   Nigel bet ante post and although he never says how much he invests, he had backed it very heavily to win at much longer odds months earlier and I have surmised that the amount he won was more than my annual salary at the time.

He was contemptuous of my winnings.  “Each way?” he scoffed.

“What were you doing backing it each way?”   

I explained that I too had studied form and had come to the opinion that Crisp, the joint favourite with Red Rum, was too big a danger and so I had hedged my bets.

“The handicappers got it wrong,” he told me.  “Crisp was carrying twenty-three pounds more than Red Rum.  Red Rum should have been carrying at least four more.”

In February 1993, he rang me and suggested that I could do worse than put some money on a particular horse in the Grand National in two months’ time.

I saw this as an opportunity for a bit of fun at work.  I announced to colleagues that I had heard from a reliable, trustworthy source who had assessed the runners for the Grand National.  

“I propose that we back this horse.  How about a communal ‘each way’ bet?  Give me some stake money every week and I will take it to Ladbrokes.  We can follow the odds and see how we are doing.”  

Within a week I had managed to convince 27 colleagues to do just that.

I told them that I would be in my office every day at lunchtime and they should pop in and I would collect their money and that the name of the horse was ROMANY KING.  

Taking money was a slow process because for many of them it was their first venture into the field.  Very few understood what an "each way" bet was and I had to explain many times.  By two o’clock, I had around £250.  At five o’clock I was in Ladbrokes and backed Romany King £125 each way at 16/1. 

Every Friday after that I returned to Ladbrokes and the amount I took with me was more every week.  I was worried that a lot of our punters didn’t seem to understand that there was any element of risk about it and Nigel, whom none of them had ever met, was acquiring almost cult status.  When I was asked who he thought would win the Eurovision Song Contest, I became really concerned.

On the day before the race, I went to Ladbrokes for what I hoped was not the last time.  I deposited over £900, bringing our grand total to something like £6,800:  £3,400 each way, at odds ranging from 16/1 to 12/1.  

If Romany King won we would share about £66,000. Some had invested more than others – a lot more and it would be my job to distribute the winnings in proportion.  

“Whatever happens though,” I told them all triumphantly, “We’ve beaten the book.  Nigel will be proud of us.”

The following afternoon, five of us got together to watch the race at Mark’s house.  You probably know what happened.  Demonstrators on the course disrupted things and the Aintree officials lost control.  The tapes went up.  Some horses set off but a lot didn’t.  Officials failed to perform their duties.  

Romany King finished third but the race was void.  If the race had counted, we’d have shared just less than £20,000.   

Ladbrokes announced that all bets, ante post and those made on the day, would be refunded.

As the outcome of the debacle unfolded I was thinking of the ramifications.  For some of the 27, it was the worst possible introduction to the noble pastime of gambling.  I knew that the money would be refunded but I was worried that some them would think that somehow, I had let them down. 

I didn’t want to go to the bookie’s and get nearly £7,000 in cash and so I phoned Ladbrokes’ head office and asked them to send me a cheque. 

“I am sorry sir,” I was told, “You will have to go to the branch.  We don’t send cheques.”

“I don’t want to come out of a bookies with cash on me,” I said.  “It might not be safe.”

“Is it a large amount sir?”

“Well no,” I said nonchalantly.  “It’s only about seven thousand pounds.”

“Not large” he said, “but significant.”     

So that’s where I heard it before.  What were you thinking?