I'm not a huge gambler - I leave that to my brother, who once won £1000 from a £10 bet on the 1994 World Cup - but this article in today's Guardian caught my eye: Bookies face Aintree meltdown. Apparently, with a whole string of favourites winning at the Cheltenham festival, coupled with other good (if you're a punter) / bad (if you're a bookie) results, a lot of the smaller, independent, bookies (the ones who normally work on course, rather than those with shops on the High Street) are not going to Aintree for the Grand National as they don't want to take the risk of losing even more.

Some of the wounded bookies are not even willing to rejoin battle. Gary Wiltshire, the independent who earned respect for rebuilding his business from scratch after being wiped out by Frankie Dettori's famous Magnificent Seven winners, warns: "Bookies can forget all idea of getting even at Liverpool. The National is a wonderful spectacle, but bookmakers hate the race - how often do we get a [profitable] result?"

Wiltshire says he will be plying his trade in the far less fraught betting rings of Lingfield or Hereford on Saturday and wryly adds: "I left Cheltenham having lost £40,000 over the three days, but when I heard the fate of some of my colleagues in the ring I felt that I had won the pools."

Yes, I know it's hard to feel sorry for bookies, who normally have what's effectively a licence to print money, but it's quite interesting to see how close to the margins a lot of them must be trading if just one month of good/bad results can come close to wiping some of them out.