Walk down just about any high street and you’ll be met with the same depressing sight; the shabby frontages of the likes of B and M, Poundstretcher, and American ‘Candy’ stores. If you’re looking for cheerful individuality just forget it.
But to my mind when it comes to lowering the tone of an area, you can’t beat that establishment whose sole aim is to part the naïve or the addicted from his hard-earned benefit money, as quickly as is humanly possible. I refer of course to the betting shop, or the bookies; Coral, Paddy Power, Ladbrokes, Betfred and others.
You’ll see them strung out about the place, their frontages at once gaudy and seedy in their corporate colours. Absolutely classy. Not. They’ll likely be very near to a pub, to facilitate easy passage between one and the other.
I’ve no idea what these places are like on the inside, never having been in one. But I visualise counters surrounded by banks of screens with pasty-faced losers staring glassy-eyed at the parade of runners and riders, disgarded betting slips strewn around their feet.
I’d love all these cynical, money-grubbing cunts to crash and burn, but as long as there’s a punter with a pound in his pocket and a burning belief that he knows the winner of the 3.30 at Kempton, it just ain’t gonna happen.
Exploitative bastards, and classless with it.
Nominated by Ron Knee.