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The Spurs always winning 2-1 after scoring first gambling formula has had a couple of glitches, but was almost back on track today. Spurs scored first again this time, but sure enough the score was 2-1 and many delighted punters who follow my system let me know about their successes. The safest thing to do is just bet 2-1 to Spurs (with if you are cautious an additional bet that they will lose 2-1), and then if they go a goal behind, then bet at preferential odds that they will win 2-1 (and lose 2-1 if you’re a pussy). It’s possible that you’re supposed to ignore midweek or cup games. The system isn’t quite finessed as yet. I for one was quite relieved that Spurs hadn’t won 2-1 in the midweek game as I would then have been faced with the decision as to whether to put all my £550 winnings on a 2-1 victory. If I had done so it would have been too nerve-wracking to make it through the afternoon (Spurs were 2-1 up in quick time again today) and if I hadn’t I would have been kicking myself at having lost out on about £6000. But then again I would only have been one bet away from making £60,000.
Of course, as any fan of Sliding Doors will know, if you change one thing then that has a knock on effect and a 2-1 win in midweek would have changed Spurs history. But as any fan of Sliding Doors will know, even in multiple universes, some things remain constant (Gwyneth Paltrow will be inexplicably attracted to a Monty Python fan whatever else happens in her life) and the Spurs always win 2-1 hypothesis is so strong that that would definitely still have happened. If I had had the balls to bet £550 on a joke.
And would I have had the balls to bet £6000 on a joke? I mean really it was just £5 (my original bet).
Like I say I was glad to be out of the loop. And perhaps for the magic to work I need to be a bystander rather than a participant. But you can put your house on this. It will definitely work as long as I don’t bet. I ask for nothing in return for making you a million, except that you give me 25% of your winnings. Or if you prefer you can just
pay a pound or more a month here and then we’re even and you don’t have to give me any of your winnings. £12 a year against a potential £10 million (or more)? You know it makes sense to give the money up front.
Plus you get secret extra videos - the Michael Legge one is now up for all subscribers and next week I am going to do a special King of Edinburgh Christmas speech which won’t be available anywhere else.
I have been putting some good work in getting my office into some kind of order. As you know this is an ongoing piece of displacement activity that I turn to every now and again as an excuse not to think about work. I am meant to be thinking of possible projects for 2015, but I don’t really have any deadlines, so this time my tidying was really for the sake of getting my life in order. There’s a good chance that we will move at some point in the near future, so it’s all for nothing, but for now it feels good to finally (almost) have everything in the right place. And for once the office looks tidier after the tidying than it did before. I’ve almost got everything where I need it to be and there’s now some actual floor space that I can walk around on without stepping on anything.
As usual I found lots of weird and cool stuff that I’d forgotten about, some of which is personal, some of which professional and I might start selling some of it on eBay to make money for Scope or for the podcasts/ TMWRNJ launch. So let’s start you off and see if I can make it work. I found a copy of a rare version of the original 2002 Talking Cock programme. There were two print runs for this, one big one for the tour (and I still have a box or so of those ones left), but one more modest one of (I’m guessing) about two to three thousand programmes for the original Edinburgh run. It slightly differs from the tour version as it has the Edinburgh dates and Pleasance box office number on the front and the inside back cover is adverts rather than the recipe for willy con carne that appears in the more common programme. I only have one other copy of this myself and doubt many of the originals still exist after all this time, so if you want a truly complete programme collection and want to give some money to Scope
then bid on the (slightly scuffed) programme here I also made a little collection of passport photos that demonstrate my decline from 17 year old dark eye-browed sex god to 46 year old alcoholic tramp. Again had I been so minded I could have made this an art project by taking a photo every year and mounting them on some dog excrement. But in a sense the fractured and incomplete nature of this study in ageing makes it more heartbreaking and a better metaphor for the pointlessness of existence.
I found a little tin of romantic momentos kept from previous girlfriends, little silly notes and keepsakes. Obviously they were important enough to me at the time to keep, but now, for a few of them, I couldn’t even remember who had given them to me, let alone why. Should I thus throw away those bits of silly tat, or keep them in memory of something that I have forgotten? The thing was important to me once, even if it has become meaningless now. So I kept it all, even though I can’t imagine I will ever recall the significance. The bits I did remember made me smile for the lost love associated with it. I had been devastated by the loss of some of those loves, but now there is only the dull ghost of pain for any of them. Love that I once thought was undying is dead and it’s weirdly quite a nice feeling.
Although I always go on a little nostalgia trip each time I tidy my office and find forgotten vestiges of my past, but this time it came with the added spin that I have a child on the way and thus as I stuck little labels on boxes that probably won’t be opened again in my lifetime I had an image of my child having to go through all this crap once I am dead (or more likely when my wife is dead) and deciding what to throw out and what to keep (if anything). If most of the stuff no longer means anything to me, then what can it mean to anyone else? In the end even if my child really loves me, it will only be practical to keep a couple of things and the rest will end up dumped in a skip. But it was nice to know that I was doing the hard bit of getting the future rubbish in an easy to destroy state.
STOP PRESS!
