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.

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?