trouble

Gambling has always struck me as a sorry pastime. After all, with other addictions you can at least enjoy the fleeting pleasures of self-annihilation. Gambling only brings ruin and misery upon thousands of families who were generally dirt-poor in the first place, and where's the fun in that?

Still, I did have a flutter today, my first in a couple of years, with the intention of placing £10 on Cathy Wilkes for this year's Turner Prize. She's based in Scotland, she used to teach at the local college, I like her work... William Hill have however stopped taking bets on the event, probably because betting on prizes is prone to being rigged by well-placed insiders looking to pull a fast one.

So I stuck it on Leeds United, who ended up losing 3-1 to Millwall in a bad-tempered match at the Den. "There'll be some trouble there," the staff at the bookies remarked, though I doubt I'd have got very good odds on that one.