Betting on the rain

Rohit Mahajan

Tribune News Service

Nottingham, June 12

The wise men in the beautiful world of gambling try to catch them young in Britain — in many gambling dens, there’s a section where even kids can bet with pennies, on the ‘Penny Drop Gambling Machine’. The operation is simple enough — they feed pennies into a machine which pushes the coins outward, and wait for large stacks of pennies to fall off, which they can then claim. The wait is often fruitless.

It’s no surprise that the bookies are accepting bets on the quantity of rain that could fall in the country. They have slashed the odds on this June being the wettest June ever recorded in Britain.

Bookies accepting bets on the amount of rain that’s going to fall this month — just beautiful!

No reserves

The rain has taken everyone by surprise. The organisers of the World Cup, ICC, have been blamed for not planning for reserve days for the tournament. That criticism seems a bit too harsh — the deluge is unprecedented in June, and wholly unexpected.

This is the wettest June in a very long time. Britain is heading for the wettest June in its recorded history. It has been forecast that on merely two days, today and tomorrow, more than double the average rainfall for June will be recorded in the island. That’s one hell of a lot of free water from the sky. It’s unmanageable.

A Met Department representative, clearly a lover of literary expressions, had this to say: “Be aware that we’re in for some treacherous weather.”

The treachery of the weather is immense. ICC says it didn’t know a  deluge was coming, and ICC is damn right.

Britain’s wettest June on record was in 2012, when 145.33mm rain was recorded over the month. Today’s estimates state that over today and tomorrow, an average of 60-80mm rain is expected in Britain, with the possibility of the figure going up to 100mm in some areas. Mercifully, the rain is expected to ease up, and the India-Pakistan match, to be played in Manchester on June 16, could well escape a washout.