WHEN I was 19 and having relief-managed almost every E Coomes bookies branch from Peckham to Mile End, I was finally given my own south-east London shop.
It was a cosy little number in a small parade of shops on the Sidcup bypass and during the week I was a one-man band: I took the bets, settled the bets and did the pay-out.
It must have been the quietest shop in the company (they had more than 100 branches) and of the 300-odd slips we took a day, 277 of them were mine. I mastered the art of altering my hand-writing from bet to bet, using all sorts of tactics from capital letters to ...