But while the medicine is of dubious legality, the thrill of the flutter is not – at least in the UK. With our authorities preferring regulation over prohibition, we’ve got unfettered access to more than 2,500 gambling sites, allowing us to wager on anything from boxing bouts to bingo. This is despite a recent UK study showing that 75 per cent of those having a flutter online are “pathological” gamblers.

“We all know how hours can slip by when we’re in front of the computer,” one internet gambler writes, “but online gambling can feel like a total timeslip – especially as the tables are open 24 hours. And I know it sounds ridiculous, but the ‘virtual’ experience makes you somehow forget that you’re playing for hard cash.”

This feeling of unreality, along with the ease of topping up gambling funds with a credit card – and getting our credit card limits lifted to brow-furrowing levels – is something that gambling support groups such as GamCare (www.gamcare.org.uk) are watching closely.

Anyone looking for short, sharp shock treatment might be advised to emigrate to America; an act was signed into law last October which made it illegal for US banks to allow any online gambling transactions. Much of the legislator’s concern surrounded potential money-laundering and tax-evasion issues, but its effect on American gambling was severe.

Of course, some of you are vehemently opposed to sanctimonious hand-wringing. “It’s always been possible to waste all your money and more on gambling,” writes Anne Marie C. “Everyone has to learn self-control and common sense.”

To assess my own susceptibility to the gambling bug, I quickly skipped past the cricket and horse-racing options on the William Hill website (www.willhill.com) and entered the “skill” section. After mentally setting myself a £10 limit, I ended up spending most of Sunday afternoon beating, and then failing to beat people at backgammon, losing and gaining around a fiver each time. Eventually I got bored of this, and stuck what I had left into an imaginary, pixellated fruit machine, and lost the lot in a couple of seconds.

Soho wastrel and acclaimed writer Jeffrey Bernard once said that to get a thrill out of gambling, the stakes have to be more than you can afford. GamCare, of course, would advise you to do precisely the opposite. It’s hard not to sound nannying, but the soundest advice – however trite it might sound – is to remember that the numbers on screen are real.