MARGARET was never born to be a croupier. She would often cause quite a stir when she'd clean up all the wrong numbers from the roulette table and have gamblers gasping as cards went flying across the room.

Most of her gaffes were because croupier-turned-author Margaret never wore her glasses at the roulette wheel. She couldn't possibly be seen in them in a world where glamorous appearances were everything.

"I was very short-sighted but I wouldn't wear my glasses because I didn't look the part in them," says Durham-born Margaret, 39. "The other girls looked a million dollars. They would always be coming up to me and giving me tips on clothes and make-up.

"I had to wear gold sandals and I inherited someone else's dress with a gaping front which was supposed to reveal a cleavage. But I stitched it up because I didn't have much of a cleavage to reveal," remembers Margaret, who currently teaches English and Creative Writing at Northumberland College, Ashington.

Her one-year career as a less-than-perfect croupier started at the age of 21 after studying English, History and Philosophy at Newcastle University. She didn't have a fixed career in mind and was attracted to the nocturnal goings-on of the casino which she has fictionalised in her book, Emotional Roulette.

She knew it was her kind of work when she saw the advert in her local Jobcentre, but realised her hand-eye co-ordination wasn't as good as it could be when she began the exciting job.

"I went for the job because I was intrigued by casinos and the type of people that visit them," says Margaret, whose first book was called Sweet Dreams are Made of This. "I didn't have a book in mind at that stage. I was just fascinated by it.

"It was like being allowed into another world and wonderful being able to see it from the inside. It was all bright and sparkly on the casino floor but as soon as you went into our staff canteen, it looked shabby and tatty, the underbelly of all that gloss, as you realised you'd suddenly entered back into the real world. There was a big old TV and croupiers in nylon dresses with fleabites because the fleas lived in the felt of the roulette tables."

She was dazzled by the customers as well. They would come in dressed to the nines and put enormous amounts of cash down on the table.

"There were some great frocks and a lot of limos, glitter and fun but there were also some ordinary people coming in to have a look at this curious world.

"It was often the minor celebrities that would be the funniest. They would put lots of money on most of the numbers on the roulette table and invariably the wheel would stop on one of the few numbers they hadn't covered."

She says she was never relied upon to be placed on the 'big money' tables where serious gamblers earned - or lost - their crust, but it was always sensational to watch them at work.

"It was amazing to see people live this lifestyle and you could follow their stories every night. It could be quite sad how some people gambled away their fortunes. You'd hear how some man had a thriving business in something or other and he'd gambled it all away.

"There would be others like taxi drivers who'd lost all their taxis, men whose marriages had broken up, all because of the gambling. It was frustrating to watch them."

She says her eye-opening experiences at the casino fired her imagination but it was only years later that she put it down on paper. The book is loosely-based on some of the characters she saw back then. The hero of Emotional Roulette is from Gosforth and the heroine is from Gateshead and their lives become entwined at the casino.

But, says Margaret, you'll have to read the book to discover if her protagonists are as hopeless on the roulette wheel as she was.

* Emotional Roulette by Margaret Burt (Hodder and Stoughton, £10.99)