The Fine Art of Cashing Out and other stories

One can hardly complain about the Cash Out facility offered by bookmakers. If you're in with a chance, you can collect some winnings but nowhere near the whole lot and quit while you're ahead.

In the 2015 Cup Final, Arsenal were 3-0 up on Aston Villa in the last few minutes and I looked set to collect at 12/1, or 16's, but kept watching the match rather than go to the computer and cash out 90% of what I was due. Silly, inattentive me. Arsenal gratuitously added a fourth goal in the 96th minute and I collected nothing.

Last night, sure that confident Fulham could beat Leeds, who have other things on their mind, 2-0, I took the 10/1. It went 2-0 with more than half an hour to go, though. I couldn't trust that there'd be no more goals but the cash out offer wasn't tempting enough. I gave it a few more minutes, thought I'd blown it when Mitrovic's header went in but he was offside. Right, that's it. I can't stand any more of this. I cashed out at 7/2.

What I could have done was switch it off and not watch. There weren't any more goals to justify my safety first strategy but at least it relieved the tension and helped the struggling account a little bit. But, what can you do. The problem was 2-0 arriving too early. At 85 minutes, I'd have braved it out.

Fulham weren't that brilliant, I didn't think. Two goals that would have been Goal of the Season in the 1970's were much more the sort of things that happen these days in what is a faster, more highly technical, pinball sort of game. Leeds had more chances but didn't take them. Fulham's passing went astray too often. At 12/1, they are not a bet to win the cup.

It is to be hoped that I've got back to winning ways on the turf before Cheltenham in thirteen days time. Expecting four horses to win at one meeting is asking a lot but Mr. Nicholls uses Wincanton as his local cash point and so maybe we'll gather some ammunition from them.

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Maggie O'Farrell's The Hand that First Held Mine was a good novel, well worth reading, but not quite the highly recommended The Marriage Portrait.

One can see the two stories gradually coming together. The time shift between two generations is slightly disconcerting with Lexie, Innes and Felix the older, 1960's generation younger than Elina and Ted but that's part of its 'art'. 'Art', as in painting, is also what it is superficially about, namedropping big names from its febrile world, not least Muriel Belcher, proprietor of the Colony Club in Soho, but it's more about family and in particular motherhood. Those parts are especially sensitively written although we might have been spared quite such a vivid description of a baby filling its nappy to beyond overflowing. She remains a joy to read though and I'll move swiftly on to the next, stopping off from time to time to enjoy prose by Wendy Cope.

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Wendy Cope, one might have thought, might have done more if she felt like it. Hugely popular, mostly for being so apparently kindly and accessible, perhaps she's a bit like John Betjeman or Alan Bennett, neither of who were quite as harmless as some of their admirers sometimes took them to be. 

Life, Love and The Archers is recollections, reviews and other prose, of which I've so far only read the early memoirs of family. But it is the very paragon of the sort of book that one can entirely trust in. It's not going to be Nietzsche but in her gentle way she's likely to be a bit subversive, a bit sceptical and very genuine.

We sort of know that Wendy could have been more than what she was sold as, with enough acumen to be more than an ironist but her art involves not needing to have been. Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis was such a throwaway poem but one could base an essay on the significance of it being Kingsley Amis, not Larkin, not Eliot, not Sylvia or Ted. It might imply that the unreconstructed Kingsley would have been the sort of husband who didn't make his own cocoa or it could mean that Wendy is modest enough to only make a bedtime drink for a less significant poet.

The feeling we are likely to get from her prose looks like being that that we get from her poems - of some comfort but knowingly so and less deceived.