At last, thank God. I lost £250. The nightmare is over. I got £50 up but then lost £300 in about five minutes without winning a single hand of blackjack (weird that this should happen only after I had called Ladbrokes “evil shits”).
See, playing internet casino is a slippery slope and itÂ’s a mugÂ’s game.
I have taught you a valuable lesson that gambling does not pay and made £1800 into the bargain. Nice! We’re all winners.
As I left the reading room of British Library this evening and crossing to the stairs to the cloak-room, I passed a young man having a heated argument on a mobile phone. He was seething with anger, trying to control the volume of the conversation, but still shouting, “You can’t do that. You can’t. Listen to me…..listen to me…..listen to me….listen to me.”
He had chosen a rather odd location for a private argument, because he was projecting his half of the conversation out into the cavernous foyer of the British library. His words echoed round for all to hear, yet still his body language was of a man trying to appear unperturbed, trying to keep the discussion between him and whoever was on the other end of the phone.
It wasnÂ’t exactly clear what the nature of the problem was. From outward appearances it looked like he was having one of those annoying arguments with a lover, where the importance of some minor problem get exaggerated out of all proportion and you blow your tops over it. It sent a chill through me as I remembered all such arguments IÂ’ve had over the years, where deep-seated problems are not discussed and the resentment spills out over some unrelated and insignificant issue.
But as I passed him and carried onwards and shared a smile with a couple of library staff who were unwilling witnesses to one side of this spat, I could still hear his strangled protests rebounding off the walls. It didnÂ’t really seem like a conversation with a lover, there was talk of not bringing the authorities into it, it was clandestine. Was he being black-mailed? If so and he had some secret he wished to hide then he had chosen the worst place to have the conversation.
He started heading out of the building, down the escalator, but the further away he got, the more the booming echo of his words increased, heightened of course, because we were in a library and everyone else was respectfully quiet.
I descended into the cloakroom and he took his phone and his voice and his problems out into the freezing London night.
