205 Mistakes? I’ve Made a Few

The blog I wrote recently about trying to ward off dementia has reminded Caroline of some things I did in the past that caused her concern as to my acuity.  

As generous as ever, she has been kind enough to remind me of them so that I may share them with you.

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A day or so after we moved into this house in 2012, Caroline had gone to work and I went for a walk around the area to see what was here. When I got back home, I realised that I had gone out without my keys.  It was 10:30 in the morning and Caroline wasn’t due back for over seven hours.  I rang her to explain my predicament and an hour later, she arrived.  She did not look happy; in fact, she looked fairly cross.

“Why did you drop the latch?” she asked.

“What?  I didn’t.”

“You must have done or it wouldn’t be locked.  I left it up when I went.”

She pushed down on the handle and opened the door.  Without saying a word, she got back into her car and set off on the 18 mile trip back to Luton.  

She did say something about it that evening, though.

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We often go to Milton Keynes Theatre.  It frequently has shows that are about to open in the West End or are touring having just ended their West End run.  In January 2022, the theatre’s pamphlet arrived listing the shows later in the year.  Among others, I bought two tickets for a Sunday, ten months later in October, when the Glenn Miller Orchestra were performing.  

There’s a Chinese restaurant next to the theatre and so that evening we ate there, leaving at 7:10 to be in our seats for the start.

It was all surprisingly quiet at the theatre and it wasn’t until we saw a poster that I realised that the only performance that day was the matinee and that had ended some two hours ago.

Oops!

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I will not go into the details of how I once spent two painful hours on my knees, taking apart and reassembling the unit that powered a string of dysfunctional solar powered festoon lights, only to discover that the cable had been severed - almost certainly by Caroline’s over-enthusiastic pruning.

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Yet again this year, I failed to back the winner of The Grand National.  I am not a great follower of horse racing and like many people, virtually the only time I ever bet on a horse race is on the Grand National.

In Caroline’s opinion, the biggest error I have ever made in my life involved the Grand National.  In 2000, we chose four horses to back. 

One of the horses Caroline chose was Papillon, ridden by Ruby Walsh.

“No,” I said, confidently, “That will never win.  No female jockey has ever won the National and there have been a number who have tried.  They rarely even finish the race.  They always seem to fall, refuse or get pulled up.”  Reluctantly, Caroline chose a different horse.  

Papillon won at 10/1.  

How was I supposed to know that Ruby Walsh was actually a 20-year-old man named Rupert?  

The only Ruby I’d ever heard of was Ruby Murray and she was definitely a female singer.  The diminutive terms for Rupert are Roo or Rupe or possibly, Bert.  Certainly not Ruby!  

Every April for the past 25 years, I am reminded of that teeny weeny slip.

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I made a bit of a cock-up on Christmas Day 2013.  There were 14 of us for Christmas Dinner and I planned to serve it at 2 p.m.  

Our next door neighbour was spending Christmas in New Zealand and as our single oven was too small for roasting a 25 pound turkey, a joint of ham and lots of potatoes, he gave me his door key and told me I could use his oven as well.

The turkey would take 7 hours to cook and so at 6:30 a.m. on Christmas Day, I let myself into next door, set the oven temperature to 180°C and put the pre-prepared turkey into the oven.  The turkey would come out at 1:30 in the afternoon to rest for 30 minutes before I began carving.

At 11:30, after I’d made sure everyone had a drink, I went to check on the turkey.  

Disaster!  The oven was not on and it never had been.  I examined it and realised that there were two dials I should have turned.  All I had done was set the temperature.  I hadn’t turned the oven on.

That caused a few problems.

121 Come on, Dover! Move yer bloomin' arse!

I have an online betting account that I opened two years ago when I discovered that we live five miles from the nearest betting shop and I wanted to back a “sure thing” that I had been tipped in the Grand National.  I put £5 each-way on ‘Pineau De Re’ and it won at 25/1.  That was nice!

I left my winnings from that race in the account and I have only dipped into it once or twice since.  My winnings have just sat there being slowly eroded by inflation.

On Grand National Saturday two weeks ago, my daughter and her family were staying with us on a visit from Yorkshire.  They invited friends from London to come up with their three children to spend a day with us in the country.  I cooked lunch.

After lunch was finished and cleared away, they all decided to go for a walk but I wasn’t going to go and I told them why:

“It’s the Grand National this afternoon and a friend of mine has given me a few horses that may have a chance,” I explained.  “I’m going to place a couple of bets and watch the race on television.”

Suddenly, their walk was cancelled.  A gambling fever hit the five of them.  Caroline wasn’t going to miss an opportunity to win money rather than relief from a household chore which is all she gets nowadays when she wins a bet. (Click to see, "You Betcha")

They had a great time choosing what horses to back.  I’m not sure of the criteria they used but Lucy, my daughter who is a teacher, chose ‘Morning Assembly’ while David, her husband, selected ‘Rocky Creek’.  I think that was because they have a dog called Rocky but David denied it vehemently.

Caroline assured me emphatically that her choice of ‘Gallant Oscar’ was certainly not because we have a nephew called Oscar but because she had very carefully studied his past form. 

I suggested to my daughter’s friend, Amber, that perhaps her selection of ‘Onenightinvienna’ was not based on any deep thought at all, because only an hour earlier she had been telling us about the weekend she had recently spent in Vienna.  She refuted that and insisted that it was a selection based on a mixture of perception, judgement and intuition.

Ten minutes before the “off” I asked if they were all done.  “No,” said Caroline “Five pounds each-way on ‘Ucello Conti’.  I’ve got a feeling”.  After a little light pressure from me, she finally admitted that her feeling was because of the ventriloquist Nina Conti whom Caroline thinks is very funny.

I acted as their bookmaker and placed their bets on my online account. I put more than £200 on 11 different horses, some of which were backed by more than one person.  The shortest price was 8-1 and the longest was 50-1.  I told Amber that if Le Reve won at 50-1, she’d have to wait for her winnings because I didn’t have three hundred pounds in cash.

Then I started to collect their money.  “Sixty pounds please Tim.”

“No, that’s not right,” he said.  “I just backed three horses.”

“Yes,” I said, “and you put ten pounds each-way on all three.”

“Three tens are thirty,” said Tim.

“Yes, but three twenties are sixty and so that’s sixty pounds please.”

Then I had to explain once again that ten pounds each-way means ten pounds on the win and ten pounds on the place.  That means twenty pounds in total for the ten pounds each-way bet. 

Amber wasn’t happy.  “I told you a pound maximum,” she grumbled at Tim.

“Don’t worry,” I said, trying to reassure her, “two of the three horses that Tim has picked are horses I was tipped by my friend and he really does know what he’s talking about.  One of them is the favourite and I reckon that at least one of them will finish in the first five so even if you do lose, you won’t lose all the sixty pounds.”

“You can’t be sure though can you?”

“No, of course I can’t be sure but you will be very unlucky indeed if all three of them fail,” I said.

Things started badly.  In fact, it couldn’t have been much worse as ‘Hadrian’s Approach’ unseated its rider at the first fence and at the second fence, both ‘First Lieutenant’ and ‘Holywell’ fell. 

The Grand National takes about 10 minutes to run and you usually get to hear your selection called by the commentator at least once.  However, our horses never seemed to get a mention.  The first time that ‘Gallant Oscar’ was mentioned was when it was pulled up at the 18^th fence. 

An air of gloomy disbelief pervaded the room as ‘Druids Nephew’ was pulled up at the 21^st and then ‘Onenightinvienna’ unseated its rider at 22^nd.

The eventual outcome was a statistical phenomenon.

Not one of our 11 selections was placed!  Only four of our eleven horses completed the course.  Ucello Conti was the most “successful” finishing sixth.  The other three were eighth, eleventh and sixteenth.

The probability of any one of 11 randomly selected horses finishing in the first 5 places in a 39 horse race is just over 75%.  Probability of 100% means that an event is certain to happen.  A probability of 0% means that it can never happen and so a 75% probability means that it is much more likely to happen than not.

We would have done better if we had been blindfolded and had chosen the horses with a pin – probably! 

We certainly couldn’t have done worse.

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.

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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?

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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?