The ecstasy and the agony

Juxtaposed title with apologies to Irving Stone, amongst others

There is so much shit and grief going on in my life at the moment that I thought I’d write down one – just one – example of ‘good news/bad news’.

Yesterday I won £120.

I don’t normally bet. According to my account at the bookies I’ve placed five bets in the last fourteen months, so it’s safe to say that I’m not what you might call ‘a regular’. I only bet on horses that are related to horses that I own/have owned. That’s my strategy, it’s that simple.

Horses related to my lovely and much-missed Beech have paid for a variety of things from ‘a couple of boxes of cream cakes’ for my colleagues in the office to a new dressage saddle – for Beech! That pot of cash was won by his half-brother. Beech hated dressage so I expect there were some ferrociously stern vibrations travelling back up the equine version of the jungle telegraph on that one.

But I digress.

Yesterday a full cousin to Beech was running in the first race of the Cheltenham festival. I didn’t even look at the odds. I recognised the name – Go Native - went online and slapped a tenner on to win.

Yesterday evening I checked the results and was thrilled for the entire Be My Native line of breeding to see that Go Native had come in at 12/1.

£120! Result!

I offered a big ‘thank you’ to Beech and his relative and shut down my laptop. ‘Windows is installing 1 of 4 updates’ said the message. I thought nothing of it. Until this morning.

Yep, I thought nothing of it until this morning when I tried to start up my laptop.

‘Tried’ as in I wanted it to but it couldn’t be arsed. My diagnosis is that something in Microsoft’s Windows update of last night is conflicting big-time with my AVG antivirus installation.

Cost of repairing this critical problem?

£117.

I know I should be grateful that I’m £3 up on the last 24 hours, but this one good news/bad news story really sums up the way my fucking life is going at the moment.