119. You Betcha!

When you are in a confined space and just three feet away from someone, conversations are varied and occasionally, perhaps, a little abstruse.  Caroline and I had to make a fairly long car journey last week.

We had a disagreement.  It’s not important now what it was about but Caroline was so certain that she was right, that she wanted to bet me a hundred pounds that she was right.

“OK,” I said, “a hundred pounds it is.”

Then I had a thought.  “What about the twenty million pounds I won when you bet me that John Lewis would be open and I said it wouldn’t be and it turned out that it wasn’t and so we had a wasted journey?  You haven’t paid me yet.”

“Ten million,” she said.  “The bet was ten million.  You know I haven't got twenty million pounds.”

“So when am I getting it?”

“Soon,” she said, “I’ve just got to sort some things out.”

I didn’t say anything but I have serious doubts that she can really afford to pay me even the ten million pounds she owes me. 

The problem I have with making bets with Caroline is that when I win, the money that she pays me comes out of our joint bank account.  I know that if I do win the bet we agreed in the car the other day, and she does pay me the hundred pounds, I will see a cash withdrawal on our current account statement. 

It won’t be for exactly a hundred pounds though.   That would be obvious.  She’s too clever for that.

I asked her how could we ever bet each other anything when the one who wins will be paid with their own money.  In other words, the winner doesn’t ever win anything and the loser loses nothing.

“Do you have to win something?” she asked.  “Isn’t the satisfaction of winning good enough for you?”

“No, it certainly isn’t,” I protested.  “The purpose of betting is to win something.  It’s not enough just to win.  You also want the other person to lose.”

“That’s a very jaundiced view,” she said.  “It doesn’t reflect very well on your character.”

“You’ve never experienced it,” I said, “but there’s something peculiarly satisfying about walking up to the counter in a betting shop and walking away with their money, even if it’s only a couple of quid.”

“So it will give you real pleasure for me to lose, will it?”

“Well, I suppose it will but it doesn’t have to come to that.  Just accept that I’m right and then we won’t need to bet and neither of us will lose anything.”

“That’s not going to happen,” she said.  “I know you’re wrong.”

“In that case, what can either of us wager that makes a bet meaningful?” I asked.

“What’s the difference between a bet and a wager?” asked Caroline.

“That’s a good question.  I don’t really know,” I said.

It is a good question and so here’s an attempt at an answer:

I’ve looked at a number of dictionaries and most of them state that ‘wager’ is a synonym of ‘bet’.  I’m not sure that it is in all cases.  I think the difference is found in the sentence I wrote above: “In that case, what can either of us wager that makes a bet meaningful?”

In that sentence, ‘bet’ is the word that describes the contract that is agreed and ‘wager’ is the amount staked in that contract.

I met a “professional” chess player called ‘Spider’ in Washington Square Park in New York last year.  Spider only seemed to have three teeth and was, so he told me, a reformed ex con who now made his living by playing chess.  “How much do your opponents bet on a game?” I asked him. 

“We never bet,” he said, haughtily.  “My opponent decides the amount and places a wager that he will win.  There’s no betting allowed here.”

Since then, Spider has become my 8 year-old nephew’s chess tutor.  Every Saturday morning, Timo goes to the park and places $5 on the chessboard.  That wager is, in fact, a tuition fee as for the next hour Spider teaches Timo as he beats him a few times.

‘Bet’ and ‘Wager’ are hardly synonyms are they?  No one would ever say, “You wager I’ll be going.”  What they’d say is, “You bet I’ll be going.” 

Now, back to our disagreement:

“How about putting the bins out?” Caroline suggested.  “Whoever loses the bet will have to put the bins out every week for a month – or two,” she added after a pause.

“That’s a big bet.   That’s about the equivalent of about a hundred pounds.”

“If you’re so sure that you’re right, that shouldn’t be a problem,” she countered, rather smugly, I thought.

“What about emptying the dishwasher?” I asked.  “It’s mundane and tedious.”

“If putting out the bins for two months is worth a hundred pounds,” Caroline asked me, “what do you reckon emptying the dishwasher is worth.”

Trying to assign a value to routine household chores is quite an exercise and it kept us occupied as we drove on the A47 over the featureless marshland between Great Yarmouth and Acle and later for several miles, south on the A11.

We decided that a points system would be used and that the values are,

Preparing food and cooking	8
Cleaning, dusting, hovering etc.	8
Ironing	7
Laundry, drying, sorting, putting away	6
Supermarket shopping	5
Mowing the lawn	5
Putting out the bins	4
Getting in logs or coal for the fire	3
Changing the bedding	2
Emptying the dishwasher	2
Locking up at night	1

Incidentally, when we first lived together, Caroline and I had a loose, informal arrangement that as a general rule, I would do all the shopping and cooking, while she would do all the cleaning and ironing. 

For a year or so that practice worked very well and then Caroline hired a weekly cleaner…. who also did the ironing! Delegation and outsourcing are professional skills that Caroline uses every day of her working life.

Once the points had been allocated, we agreed that if I win the bet, Caroline would be putting the bins out for the next three Wednesdays but if she wins, I will be emptying the dishwasher for a fortnight.

I think I’m going to buy some disposable paper plates and cups - just in case! 

Hee hee.

118, Nutter

What is it about me that attracts nutters?  If you read Brief Encounter (click to read) in November 2010, you may remember the nutter who accosted me on Winchmore Hill Station.

It’s happened again.  I was sitting on a bench by the checkout at Waitrose last Saturday morning.  Caroline had taken the trolley to the far end of the supermarket where “Ladies’ Things” are kept.  

A woman, who is probably about the same age as me, joined me on the bench.  She immediately asked me where I had got my walking stick with its ergonomically designed handle.  I told her that I had bought it from a shop in New Oxford Street at the southern end of Tottenham Court Road in London.

“Oh, I know that shop,” she said, “It’s near the pub where De Gaulle spent the war sitting on his fat bottom.”

“Really?” I said.  “I didn’t know that.  What pub?”

“I think it’s called the French Pub, or something like that now.  It changed its name because of De Gaulle. Overrun in four weeks.  Some General!”

(I’ve done some research and I think that the pub she was referring to is ‘The French House’ in Dean Street, Soho.)

“That was hardly De Gaulle’s fault,” I said.  “The French were fighting against forces with better equipment and larger numbers.   In a military sense, the Germans were superior to them in every way.”

“Nonsense!  The French didn’t put up any sort of fight.  They were more interested in protecting their historic buildings from damage than defending themselves.”

“Nowadays,” she went on, becoming quite animated, “apart from Germany, most of Europe is failing and Germany’s got itself into problems by welcoming in millions of migrants.  Thank God we didn’t take up the Euro.”

“Something tells me that you’ll be voting to leave the EU in the referendum this summer,” I suggested.

“Of course I will!  Why do you need a walking stick anyway?” she suddenly demanded.

I was somewhat disconcerted by the sudden change in subject and amazed that for the first time in my life I had been defending the French.  

I told her about my ankle and that I was expecting a reparatory operation that could possibly mean that I wouldn’t need the stick one day.  On hearing this, she came out with another dogmatic pronouncement:

“I don’t trust doctors but I do trust and I do use, reflexologists.”  

“Homeopaths too?”

“Of course.  You should try one.  Then you’ll see I’m right.”

I may have laughed a little.  I told her that there wasn’t much that a homeopathic doctor could do for my arthritic ankle bones.

She wasn’t interested in any kind of discussion on that topic but informed me that if the recent stories on the news were correct - stories such as those about a possible cancer cure and of stem cell research that enables the paralysed to walk again, we were all going to live to be a hundred.  

On top of that, she told me, it looked as though babies born today would live for hundreds of years and some of them would, maybe, never die.

That bombshell was slowly sinking in but, before I had time to consider it in any detail, she hit me with an opinion that took her out of the classification into which I had previously consigned her - that of being a bit of a “Nutter”, into a group I’ve never come across before.  

In future, before you dismiss anyone of being a racist, just try and work out how he or she measures up to this woman and her attitudes, views and opinions.

“If we in Europe and America are going to live for hundreds of years,” she almost shouted at me in her fervour, “what do we need the third world for?”

I just stared at my walking stick handle, wondering what was taking Caroline so long.  I was lost for words and silently cursing my stick for getting me into this mess.

“Well?” she demanded after a few seconds, “What do we need them for?  What good are they?  What purpose do they serve?  We should just leave them to get on with it.”

“That’s outrageous,” I said.  “How are all those things connected?  By your reasoning, what good am I?  What am I needed for?  I’m non-productive and I’m a drain on the NHS.”

“Yes, but you’re different,” she said.  

“No, I’m not.  How am I different?” I asked.

“Well for a start, you’re British.”

“You mean white, don’t you?”

“Oh no.  That’s not what I mean…” but before she could tell me more, Caroline arrived with the trolley.  

“Credit card please.”   

Consequently, I never found out exactly how I was different or what I was good for.