Something I have always been thankful for is not succumbing to gambling. This is not because of any lofty moral stance but the reality that with my luck, I would never have a hope of winning. In fact, the only time I ever won anything by chance was at a church fete lottery at the age of 10. The prize was a large bar of soap which at that age seemed more of a punishment than a reward.
A few years later, I received an early lesson in the reality of gambling as a student in Kingston-on-Thames. In the mid-1960s, a group of us went to nearby Epsom racecourse to witness the annual Derby. Having made the effort to get there it seemed churlish not to have a flutter on the legendary race.
The one problem was that I didn't know anything about racehorses. So, I ended up putting a fiver on a horse simply because I liked its name. I can't remember what it was called, but at the finish, it trotted in near the back of the field, resembling more a carthorse than a thoroughbred. Well, it was only a fiver.
Which in a roundabout way, leads us to the current debate concerning the wisdom of legalising casinos in Thailand. It is a complicated issue, and you get the feeling that the general public is not entirely convinced. Looks like we could be in for more mulling, musing, cogitating, ruminating and pondering. You can almost bet on it.
Fickle fortune
Some years ago, an English magazine gave one of their journalists a substantial amount of money to see how he fared in a London casino. He lost the lot very quickly. One croupier told the journalist: "There's no betting system that works. If there was, all the croupiers and managers currently would be the other side of the table. You can never beat the casino."
It brings to mind the old joke: "There is a very easy way to return from a casino with a small fortune: go there with a large one."
The watchers
The best film on gambling is arguably Martin Scorcese's 1995 offering, Casino, set in Las Vegas in the mid-1970s. Robert De Niro plays Sam "Ace" Rothstein who's in charge of daily operations at a large casino. At one stage, Rothstein narrates what goes on behind the scenes:
"In Vegas, everybody's got to watch everybody else. Since the players are looking to beat the casino, the dealers are watching the players. The box men are watching the dealers. The floor men are watching the box men. The pit bosses are watching the floor men. The shift bosses are watching the pit bosses…" and so it goes on.
It's only a movie, but you get the idea.
City of Three Mists
The reports concerning the small town of Pai in Mae Hong Son province struggling to cope with the influx of young tourists are inevitable in these days of mass tourism. It is getting hard to find beautiful spots in the kingdom that have not been overrun. It baffles me why overseas visitors want to go to places already packed with thousands of other tourists.
I have never been to Pai, but in the early 1970s, colleague Peter Finucane and I took a flight from Chiang Mai to the provincial capital, Mae Hong Son (City of Three Mists).
Our plane was an old Dakota, which had seen better times. You really knew you were flying, and it was a bit of a white-knuckle ride as we lurched through the turbulence with the mountains not far below. Landing at Mae Hong Son was an experience in itself. With mountains close at hand, guidebooks call the approach "scenic", but if the weather is uncooperative, scenic rapidly transforms into scary. Thankfully, our landing was as smooth as silk.
We had gone to Mae Hong Son because, in those days, it was regarded as the remotest province in the kingdom. It lived up to its reputation, too, in the nicest possible way: peaceful and blissfully free of tourists. The only eyesores were Peter and me.
Dakota days
The only other time I boarded a Dakota was about 10 years after the Mae Hong Son trip, but we didn't actually fly. It was 1981, and I was an extra in a film called Angkor (later to have Cambodia Express added.) It was set in the days of the Khmer Rouge, and we were at Don Mueang airport, which was masquerading as Phnom Penh's Pochentong.
The scene required us extras to sit in the Dakota for "just a few minutes" while the hero was arrested and hauled off the plane by Khmer Rouge soldiers. Unsurprisingly, those "few minutes" lasted the whole day. It was blisteringly hot, and the plane had no air conditioning. While we were sitting there roasting through the afternoon, I pondered over the possibility that this plane could be the same Dakota that took us to Mae Hong Son a decade before. I was just thankful we weren't about to take off.
Final words
Many thanks to readers for contributing offerings on last week's "Old Soldiers" graffiti theme. I particularly liked "Old musicians never die. They just get further strung out."
And a bit closer to home: "Old scribes never die. They just get lost for words."
Contact PostScript via email at oldcrutch@hotmail.com