Country Living with Francis Farragher

Most of us who have spent a half-dozen decades or more on this green earth will have sampled their share of vices and I cannot by any moral barometer claim to have avoided most of them. An exception to that, thankfully, has been gambling where some kind of primal safety button kicks in at the thought of losing a pile of money without getting anything in return.

True, there will be a few bets this week, as the gee-gees take to the hallowed turf of Ballybrit but very seldom these days is the ‘fiver-each-way’ barrier crossed.

Maybe it all goes back to a day at the Tuam Races – now, there’s a lot of water under the bridge since then – when as a 12 or 13-year-old, I managed to amass the considerable fortune of one pound note to spend at the Parkmore course.

Too young for ‘the drink’, and with a free lift to town, by virtue of my right thumb, the pound note was used to speculate on a straws competition ran by a very well-known Tuam ‘entrepreneur’ of the time.

At just a shilling a go [20 of them to the old pound] it presented a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to land one of an amazing selection of prizes that included a pair of binoculars, tape-recorders [a big thing in the late ‘60s], transistor radios as well as various canisters of sweet and chocolates.

Try as I might though, with the 20 shillings pretty much exhausted, I couldn’t manage to land one of the elusive prizes even though there seemed to be winners all-around. Sometimes, I’d win two ‘free straws’.

As the day wore on, and with the pound well and truly gambled away, the penny dropped, as the big prizes that seemed to have been won maybe 25-minutes earlier, almost miraculously reappeared on the display table.

With not even the price of a bag of chips to buy at the local Wimpy, I realised that I had been conned out my money and later that evening when I observed the young ‘prize-winners’ helping the entrepreneur to gather up his stuff, I realised the wisdom of the saying that a ‘a fool and his money are soon parted’.