Tony Walker

That's a fairly common phrase even.

So the hospitality of my poor roof.

And then he adds something, you know, my poor roof is just like, you know, you might say, oh, come under my poor roof.

And it's not true.

It's just a self-deprecating way of not making yourself sound too big.

Because that's a really big thing in British culture is not to boast.

I think it's dying away under the influence of the Internet.

But definitely, certainly when I was growing up,

You don't make a big deal of yourself.

Anything you do is, oh, it's, you know, you make, you deprecate it.

So my poor roof, not my wonderful roof, my gorgeous place, or my poor, even if it is gorgeous, my poor roof.

And of course he adds, it let the wet in, another joke, and he punctures it.

And I offered to lay a sixpence about it.

He's talking about putting a bet on.

So hence this was before the betting tax came in.

A sixpence is, in the old days, a shilling was 12 pennies, 12 pence, so it was a sixpence.

I remember the little silver sixpences and shillings.

They went out in 1971, so I was still pretty young when it went out, so it's a very, very small thing.

1926, the Betting Duties Act came in, in case you're interested, which taxed on-course bookmakers for the first time.

Now, very interesting thing here.