Dodgy City?

Chips with everything

The traditional Christmas poker session saw DLL triumphant. She was chip leader when time was called and we all assembled to watch the Jack Whitehall DVD. She's brilliantly uncomplicated sometimes.

“Why don't we start with hundreds, make the reds five hundreds, the blues thousands and the greens five grand?” I suggested. More exciting to say “I'll see your ten, and raise you fifteen grand” I thought.

“Why don't we stick with one, five, ten and twenty fives as usual, small blind one and big blind two to begin with?”

“Okay”. Shot down again.

There was a bible-toting station officer, at a large, multi-appliance fire station. I had a temporary posting there. After some weeks of rumour and whispers, a memo had been circulated. After 'an unfortunate incident' involving 'gambling for high stakes' on a night shift, all officers in charge were to ensure that, if any card games were played for money, the stakes were to be moderate and the games strictly controlled. Mr Bible had gone to town on this. He'd gone to great lengths to ensure everyone understood the message. To use the Brigade technical term, he'd properly torn the arse out of it. He seemed to be one of those that thought a pack of playing cards was an evil entity donated by the devil.

The 'unfortunate incident', depending on where on the rumour spectrum you were, involved anything from visits to A&E for running repairs to firearms offences; and the 'high stakes' were hundreds of pounds, or cars, houses and possibly wives.

Later, between night shifts one of the blokes was paid for some work he'd done, and unexpectedly, weighed out in a large amount of cashmoney. Station Officer Bible walked into the mess room and there we were, somewhere around six thousand in used notes in piles around the table, cards laid out in Texas Hold-'em style. Give him credit, he said:

“****ing hell. What's this? Dodge ****ing City?”

Ah. Isn't it nice to know we're in such safe hands?

This is a Tory MP, from his interview in the Guardian. He had described the proposed gay marriage laws as 'barking mad'.

“I haven't done years of diversity training, so sometimes I say things which are probably tactless...these feelings are hard to articulate...[without upsetting] a whole lot of people, some of whom I actually quite like.”

If you need years of diversity training to respect and treat others properly, mate, you're bit of a lost cause. Like most fundamentalists, your fundamental flaw is thinking all other fundamentalists are absolutely wrong. You are entrusted with looking after our free speech in a country with free speech supposedly enshrined in the constitution. If your feelings might upset someone, go for it. Articulate away. If by “difficult to articulate” you mean “difficult to articulate while remaining remotely electable”, then you've no right standing for election in the first place. That's my opinion, articulated, right there.

That 'whole lot of people, some of whom I actually quite like'? That's invented journalistic irony, right? Does anyone say things like: “actually, some of my friends are black / gay / Jews / not public school educated, why, just the other day I had a long conversation with a chap who didn't have a nanny and didn't ride out with the local hunt, can you imagine...”