It was the end of May 1983, half term week. I was meant to be revising for my O-levels, which were to begin the following Monday, but instead was mooching around town, a teenager ready to be led astray. And when I bumped into a couple of similarly unfocused classmates, that’s exactly what happened.
Instead of studying, they’d been seduced by gambling – specifically, betting on the horses. And now they were trying to seduce me. ‘You’ll love it,’ I was promised as they led me into a Ladbrokes, where the air was thick with fag smoke and booming with racetrack commentary.
They explained the procedure to me – the races were displayed by their start time, this was the list of runners on the board and those sets of two numbers were their odds. By this third category my familiar maths aversion was kicking in, so I just stuck with looking at the names.
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