Helmintholog

Two things Bob Conquest told me to Reagan’s credit: that he was the only politician who ever actually listened when he, Conquest, was giving an opinion he had been asked for. For most of them asking for an opinion is a mark of favour, not of interest in what you might have to say. Secondly, that his loathing of communism came from his time in the SAG, when he dealt with real communist cells and realised what treacherous and disciplined bastards they were.

I passed the first snippet along to my mother, who worked alongside Conquest and my father in the IRD, the black propaganda department of the Foreign Office. Her response was incredulity that Conquest could ever express an opinion in terms that Reagan could understand.

In my first term at prep school, I was introduced to vingt-et-un. It was the most important and interesting game I had ever discovered, and withiin three weeks I owed an older boy something in the region of 89,000,000 royal mints. The royal mint was the figure we used for ‘all the money in England’ to our eyes all the money in the world.
Portions of this debt were paid off in sherbet fountains from the tuck shop for the rest of the term; I’d still be paying off other portions if the racket hadn’t come to the attention of the authorities, who decreed a general amnesty on gambling debts. I have never since gambled for more than I can afford to lose; but I still feel the occasional vertiginous tug from the abyss.

But some things are just too obvious to be tempting. Out of one of the newspapers last week fluttered a brochure from IG Index, offering the chance to make live spread bets from a mobile phone. To bet with credit cards on the internet must be the smoothest form of damnation known to man. Anyone who has ever been drunk in charge of a modem will feel a rush of gratitude that this happened without being online to a bookie. But to do so from a mobile, with the chance of the signal dropping at some crucial moment … well, it would at least be interesting.

My fifteen-year-old nephew by marriage recently pitched up on his grandmother’s doorstep at 1.30am, half drunk and wholly terrified after being chased through the streets by a gang with knives. This is a whole lot younger than I was when I started hanging out with people who settled arguments that way. More shocking, I think, is that it all happened in Winchester, a town of stultifying wealth and respectability.

Out of a population of 107,000, 353 are officially unemployed. I do hope the knives young Piers was threatened with weren’t plate.