You may not be familiar with the term, but the ‘house edge’ is that rule which dictates that the casino never loses. Not at roulette, not at Blackjack, not at anything. In a part of my past that is swathed in the mists of a previous century, I used to help run the First Royal Green Jackets roulette syndicate, so I should know. People who have held accounts with British clearing banks over the years will probably understand what I mean, as will anyone who insures anything, or who is persuaded by a supermarket to bulk buy a promotional product.
For complicated reasons, I spent an hour earlier in the week in the Giant Amusement Arcade’ on Weston-super-Mare’s Grand Pier, a refreshing microcosm of Boris’ Britain if ever there was one, and saw this all at first hand. Everything there was about suspending disbelief, a pallid, shouty version of what it had once probably been. The pinball machine, for example, which was licensed to the Batman franchise for a reason that wasn’t entirely clear, dealt its points out in tens of millions where the old ones would have gone up in hundreds, and blared white noise at you whenever you did something incompetent. Which, with me, was permanently. All the games requiring a modicum of skill produced endless spooled tapes of ‘prize tickets’, however appallingly you had done, that gave you the impression that your modest efforts were about to be awarded by a stellar prize, but which in fact needed to amount to 5000 just to win the mini pink Covid Bear at the end. Like a ministerial press conference, everything was ‘world beating’, ‘first class’ and ‘state of the art’, at least it was until you looked behind the superstructure and saw the crumbling edifice that, for now, supported it. Here, everyone was a winner, even when they had lost their last penny.
Best of all was the Coin Pusher machine, that repository of thousands of small denomination coins that always look as though they will fall in bountiful hordes once you put a single coin in, and whose disappointed promises almost entirely mimic the British pension industry. As with pensions, it is almost impossible to win. So that I don’t get into trouble, google ‘why coin pushing machines never fail’, and you will at least learn an interesting lesson in physics, and in sleights of hand.
Even the Covid signage at the start and most of the way round looked like it could have been crafted straight from the pen of Ms Priti Patel, with its tantalising threat of eviction and worse, if we didn’t stay masked up, and avoid minglin’ with each other.
You might think that I hadn’t enjoyed the whole experience, but you would be quite wrong. I loved it.
Granted, I was with two friends who just happen to make me very happy, and with whom I was about to spend an afternoon playing distressingly bad golf on the local links. The whole familiar feeling, for all its grubby tat and razzamatazz, just reminded me how lucky I was to live in a place that I still vaguely understand, and which hasn’t yet gone totally to the dark side. If I had collapsed on the floor there and then, I would have received world class care irrespective of whether I had a penny to my name. If I had shouted out how much I hated this thing or that about my country or its government, people would have shuffled politely past me and largely left me to my opinions. Eventually, an almost certainly polite policeman would have asked me to move on, and would have called me ‘Sir into the bargain.
I felt this very deeply when I turned on the breakfast news this morning and watched two men in their seventies shouting insults at each other for the privilege of leading what is still the world’s most important nation for the next four years, a nation where most of us have any number of big-hearted friends.
Both were truly awful, but I dislike one of them so much more than the other, that I found myself taking each insult he traded as a body blow for myself, and not just the other guy.
We risk forgetting, with all our grim problems, all the things we have not yet lost.
Comments