Re: Does anyone still do the pools?
Does the "pools" still exist these days? If it does, it has had a low profile in the past 20 years or so. They used to advertise around the horseracing pages of the tabloid newspapers, usually Littlewoods, Vernons, and Ladbrokes, I think, offering some inflated money prize probably paid by cheque if won - it was the National Lottery of its day, and I have a feeling that the Lottery itself starting up in 1994 was one of the main reasons that fewer people started to play on the pools - it became unpopular and so the interest of it went down because of the National Lottery from the second half of the 1990s onwards.
It reminds me of the "Spot the Ball" competitions in local newspapers that ran in the 1970s and 1980s, and some local newsagents had a yellow box where one could post your coupon in - alas, it ended when I was old enough to enter myself.
Telling it almost exactly like it was so many years later - and proud of doing so!