Grumpy Oldie Man
Confessions of a gambling addict
The Government has made it far too easy for us to bet our lives away matthew norman The day approaches when historians must turn to analysing Little Britain’s final, irreversible descent into the post-imperial cesspit. Reassuringly, it won’t dawn for a long time. Next Thursday would be my best guess. But whenever it comes, the budding Simon Schamas will identify a host of disgraces that have lent this increasingly septic isle the enticing fragrance of a sub-Saharan failed state. Take, for instance, the barely reported fact that prisoners are dying, unattended, from such anachronistically lethal ailments as the stomach ulcer. The horror of the Windrush scandal fights for honours-board prominence with the kind of blatant corruptions (dirty Russian funding, PPI contracts gifted to ministerial mates etc) that afflict yucky foreign regimes, but could never happen here. Among all the symptoms of terminal decay, one that for me stands out for personal reasons is the attitude to gambling. Backbench libertarians – those geniuses who passionately believe in the freedom to choose one’s own path to hell while cheerleading deafeningly for the ‘war against drugs’ – would take issue. But those who know the peril regard it as a basic duty of government to protect the vulnerable from such a pernicious drug. The philosopher Paul Merson – more familiar perhaps as an erstwhile midfield magician for Arsenal and England – could not be clearer on the danger. Mr Merson landed the dazzlingly addictive trifecta of drink, cocaine and gambling. Seven million pounds later, he has licked the addictions to booze and Colombia’s finest. The third he can’t beat. Since his troubles predate the uncontrolled explosion of digitised gambling, in his case the state is exonerated. But for former cricketer Patrick Foster, author of Might Bite: The 10 The Oldie April 2022
Secret Life of a Gambling Addict, governmental greed stands accused. His travails began with one of those roulette machines Labour allowed to invade the sovereign turf of the highstreet bookie in 2003. A flash of beginner’s luck grew a couple of quid into several hundred. So began Mr Foster’s charge to the edge of suicide. For those with the predisposition, it takes only one spin. I have mentioned before the family holiday to Portugal during which my late father altered a passport to make me old enough for the casino. Befuddled by the chips that Algarve night, for my first spin of the ivory ball I put the equivalent of a fiver, rather than the intended 50p, on 17 black. Up the bastard came. I was £175 up, the psychochemicals surged berserkly and that was that. When later I blew two months’ wages in an hour in Cannes, I never felt so exhilarated. Real gamblers – sadomasochists with no appetite for the Frank Bough Memorial Gimp Mask – gamble not to win, as Dostoyevsky wrote, but to lose. Another few years on, the last night of our honeymoon at the sadly defunct Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City – a night lubricated by multiple octuple bourbons on the house – went so poorly, I had to beg 50c off a bellboy to get through the New Jersey Turnpike en route to Newark Airport. How close I came to serious selfdestruction is hard to gauge. One will romanticise the past. But if anything saved me, it was the relative difficulty of
‘I miss the old days when you could offend people without them taking offence’
gambling. The legal requirement to apply for casino membership and wait for approval (long since revoked) was a sufficient psychological barrier to restrict the catastrophes to foreign holidays. With the arrival of the high-street fixed-odds betting terminal (I hesitate to use the acronym FOBT lest anyone confuse it with that popular diagnostic tool the faecal occult blood test) came a relapse. Suddenly, battalions of pensioners, migrant workers and benefits claimants were, to use the technical term, doing their bollocks. The Treasury of the supposedly puritanical Gordon Brown relished what is effectively a regressive tax on the poor. Mr Foster wasn’t poor – at least for a while. Soon enough, he had debts of £250,000, and was moments from redecorating the underside of a commuter train with his innards. He withdrew from the brink, literally and otherwise, but many others have not. Of all addictions, this one drives more to suicide than any other. Untold numbers of those who survive visit barely imaginable grief on themselves and their families. That high-street virtual roulette has been tamed, by drastically limited maximum stakes, is almost meaningless when the plethora of online casinos have not. It takes two minutes to make a credit-card deposit of £500, and less to lose the lot. It is avarice bordering on wickedness for a government knowingly to heap the pile of human suffering for the kind of annual revenue it blew in a week on phantasmal face masks. This may not be the present Prime Minister’s paramount concern right now. But, having closely studied the form book, we may rely on him to correct this abomination if and when we emerge from Mr Putin’s cheeky little punt on Ukraine.
