Mark Coton longs for the days when you were allowed to battle the bookies, win or lose

MARK COTON
What colourful and exotic creatures they were, now so rarely sighted as to be considered endangered. Perhaps extinct.
There was a Bird and a Bull, a pair of Ramsdens; latterly a Curley and a Findlay.
Of course “professional gamblers’ exist now, but only on betting’s dark web; so many grey, shadowy figures hunched behind banks of computer screens, nursing repetitive strain injuries alongside their pock-marked copies of Daniel Kahnweiler’s Thinking Fast And Slow.
It’...