Four Years Ago Tonight

 I remember it only too vividly.

I wouldn't have even been up so late except I'd been to the opera. It's not often that Monteverdi opera is staged in Portsmouth. It must have been after midnight when I finished reviewing it but then, fatally, I clicked onto Paddy Power and put all that was in my account on Hillary at about 2/11.

It wasn't as if I needed the paltry winnings but, like a capitalist, really, I thought I was helping myself and didn't worry very much about the shift to 1/5 I saw before going to bed.

I woke to disturbing radio broadcasts the following morning that it was looking very much like Trump. It was hard to believe that I had woken up, that it was really the BBC and that the foul-mouthed impostor that already, in 2016, had lost several of his henchmen who had dissociated themselves from that particular aberration of the Republican cause, was the new president. Disbelief took on new proportions.

It didn't only cost me that in 2016, although the horses ran well enough to show a healthy overall profit. I also bet on the Remain vote being between 50.1% and 55% on the night that Mr. Farage, thinking that he'd lost, said that if the result was 52-48 against him then the argument wasn't over.

Tonight I'm looking at odds of 4/9 Biden, 13/8 Trump. But I'm not falling for that one again. Horses are much more reliable than politics. I'll have a look at Musselburgh in the morning.

Those tiny amounts of cash don't mean anything at all. If Trump gets four more years then we've all lost most of anything we ever had.