Hossenfeffer

Coffee cups and suitcases.

I voted for independence in that referendum.

Cracker was utterly brilliant.

Mind how you go!

Happy Valley is probably the best UK show of the last decade.

It was basically a Call of Cthulhu campaign played out on screen!

No, they look just about perfect to me, I don’t like too much sauce on my slice.

Computers were still exciting. And hadn’t been enshitified.

£20.

I was in Chess Club at school (I know, I know, quite the jock!). We played chess. Then we got bored of chess and played backgammon. And backgammon without a bet is dull, so we started gambling. Then gambling became the point of playing. Then we moved on to poker.

I remember one poker hand. The deck was made up of about five different packs of cards. Jokers, black twos, one-eyed jacks, bedside queens, and suicide kings were all wild. I ended up with a hand of five aces. Two were real aces, three were wild cards. I had to raise. I mean, how can you not raise with five aces? What is the point of playing poker if you don’t raise with five aces?

Sadly, two other people also had five aces and one of them had three real aces and only two wild cards so they won the hand.

I lost £20 on that single hand and hated every single moment of playing it because somehow I knew, deep down, that I was going to lose. This was in the mid-1980s, and that was a lot of money for me back then and there were other, far better things I could have dropped it on - LPs were about £5 back then, video games £10 (or £2 for a budget game).

But, it was a great early lesson on the ‘gotta keep going’ mindset of the gambler combined with the certainty that I was going to lose my money. I’m glad it happened, despite the short term remorse I felt immediately afterwards.