July 16th – Not until the next time, will I cry all night for you.

Cleaned myself: 0
Monkey see, monkey do: 0
Tics: it’s just an angry phase
Believe in God? She’s there all right.
YTLH: 0

Two consecutive entries about gambling. Spare a thought for your reader. Well spare a thought for the writer actually. I started this diary as a means to document the way in which God dumped on me, in particular, through the medium of gambling. I have done well to restrict it to two. Yesterday I said that I have hundreds of similar stories, that’s not true, I have thousands. I have at least one story per week. Once it’s said, it’s gone, and then no more (until the next time). I just want to have one go at testing the healing qualities of sharing. You know, by forcing you to listen, I might learn to heed.             

Last night I broke my self-imposed purdah from fitba, which has been part of my own lonely struggle to have VAR discontinued on pain of losing me as a follower; hoping that somehow it would gain traction and become a movement. But nobody seems to have noticed that I haven’t been tuning in. I’ve launched on Twitter too, but with no followers it’s difficult.

It was to watch Milfchester Rovers, for whom I hold a passing ambivalence; it’s nowhere near as strong as my true allegiance – that to my last bet, but it’s an interest, nevertheless. Since the resumption they keep on winning, and have turned an awful season around, so that coming into last night’s game, had they won, they would not so much have crept into the Top 4 by the backdoor, so much as vaulted into a merited third place. Never mind that we’ve only had to play teams like Spaedo Bumpstead and Bounderland, it’s all been about re-discovering of mojo, realising that all the local boys playing in the under-15s were better than the first team, and mostly, having nothing whatsoever to do with our vag-faced CEO.

So, you can put our international elite’s double-yolked curate’s egg of a performance against Dagenham Toms down to me for deciding to take an interest and watch my first football match since March. I didn’t even have a bet. I’ll stay away again now – both to help them out, and to continue to ram home my VAR message, and I’ll store up my cosmic gifts and employ them to get Milfchester Cardinals humiliated in the Champions League which follows in August.

I am so angry about VAR – not so much from a luke warm supporter angle, as from the gambling perspective.  I’ve had four consecutive winning bets since the resumption that went down on one leg in which the true result was skewed by VAR ineptitude.

*VAR = video assistant referee. Instead of adjudicator on pitch making decisions, the responsibility is passed on to a man watching television in an office at another location. Often he’s out making a cup of tea when the referral call comes through and he guesses. They’re all 50-50s, and apparently you don’t have to be right – as long as you answer with confidence (advice courtesy of Goldman Sachs Investment Management, who consult to the VAR project).

Here’s my slogan: That incident is of such little consequence that I am going to ignore it. I intend to tweet that in response to every view to which I can reasonably establish a contrary position, since it strikes me that we can extrapolate from the VAR fiasco and apply the principle to the general awfulness of everything else too. That’s how campaigns get going – let the people adapt your message to explain their own particular predicaments.

And until the point is won, I am going to be as intolerant of anyone who looks like they have a leaning towards admin as I possibly can be. I’ll start with the easy targets like men in blazers and lowly clerks like Johnny Carver.

thanks to Mari Lezhava for image of old man and magnifying glass
& Sukhveer Hans for his image of the television set.