Racing conversation scarce but Cheese retains flavour

"A gambler's day goes pleasantly enough. He gets up late. His first call is at the barber's, where a long session is as much devoted to business – discussing the afternoon's racecards with the boys, telling them how he got on last night and hearing their stories – as to the pleasure of lying under hot towels."

The closest I came to that sort of paradise was in Vincenzo's off Marylebone High Street about 40 years ago. Vincenzo, a barber of the old school, let us use his back room for a game of seven-card stud. The only problem was his freshly laundered towels were drying on the radiator and the steam made the cards go limp. Still, it was a nice gesture and fun while it lasted.

The passage above is from Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire by Iain Sinclair, although it appeared originally in Alexander Baron's The Lowlife (1963), the best of the Hackney Jewish gambling novels of that era.