The Lottery

 My current kitchen. 

Note the lack of space for simultaneous prep of healthy suppers and baking.

 I'm listening to the radio at the moment. There is a phone-in on at the moment about whether money makes you happy. I cannot believe how many people are ringing in to say they would not want to win the lottery!

We don't really play the lottery. The Grumpster and I chose a set of numbers each when the Lottery started in 1994, based on things like the phone number, door number, birthdays, lucky numbers and the odd dream-like vision. Not understanding the lottery fully at the time, we felt obliged to buy our two tickets every Saturday, because obviously the week we didn't put the numbers in would certainly be the week our numbers would come up. We became slaves to it.

The Grumpster would attack me as I walked through the door, hands full of shopping bags with an urgent 'Have you bought the lottery tickets?'  Inevitably I would feel my heart drop into my stomach, I would struggle to gasp in oxygen, I would feel tears pricking the corners of my eyes. I would barely manage to whisper 'No' in reply before he was grabbing his coat and car keys and running for his life into the darkness (or gorgeous sunshine for May/June/July-we had hot summers back then).

We kept this going for quite some time. If we knew we were going to be busy on the Saturday, we'd plan ahead and buy our tickets on the Friday. We couldn't afford to buy a number of weeks ahead (we had a 30K mortgage to pay-we were positively poor!) and for some unfathomable reason we felt we felt it was perhaps frivolous-or maybe too addictive to buy more than one day ahead, so there were occasional slip-ups. A mistaken Saturday evening would go as follows:-

Grumpster (mixing concrete to scree the floor/slapping paint on a badly-plastered wall) : 'What time does the Lottery close tonight?'
Me (Heating up microwave food on the skanky kitchen floor as the worktops were out for about 8 months) : 'Oh my Goodness!-I'll run up to the Spar and see if we aren't too late.'
Grumpster (grumpily) : 'Well that will be our numbers coming out of the machine tonight then'

(I must note that I'm pretty sure the lottery was played at random times depending on the TV schedule, we can't have been that crap at remembering a fixed time for 'last orders')

Shortly after my empty-handed return, we would sit, scooping our curries out of the black plastic trays that they were heated up in, eyes fixed on the screen with the multi-coloured balls rolling mesmerically before our eyes. Under my breath I'd be muttering 'not my numbers' over and over again like a woman posessed, The Grumpster to my side, his steely-face willing our numbers to stay in the huge bowl. As the first number was drawn up the tube, our nerves would reach the sort of height normally experienced in the face of abject danger. My eyes would be dancing like bees around a daisy as I tried to read the number on the side as it rolled down the little slope. A small bounce at the end of the run, and I could again breathe. Not my number. No missed millions this week. By the time I'd tuned my brain back into the TV I'd be relieved to see four balls sitting at the bottom of the screen, none with our numbers, not even a tennner missed, and a pound richer. The Grumpster, true to form however, would still be bemoaning his luck 'Our bloody numbers never come up'! Oh, how half empty his glass is!

At some stage, possibly a year into the lottery, someone (I suspect Mother-of-The Grumpster) gave us a small gift. It was intended to be useful to us, but proved to be more ruinous to our Lottery journey than anything. It was a pen. Cheap, not very tactile and too clumsy to use, but there was more to it than the pen 'feature'. The pen was the standard length of a biro, maybe a little skinnier which contributed to it's unusability as a pen, which was then compounded by the main feature- a large, globe-like sphere which rattled it's cargo of mini balls around with every movement. Yes, you got it, it was a  Lottery-number-selector-pen! The idea was, you held it with the globe-end pointing down, shook the balls to ensure random-ness, and then flipped it over, pen-end down, and there, in the shaft, would be six balls, randomly chosen from the 49 available, for us to copy onto a lottery-form and morph into a winning ticket!

So exciting. But we already had our numbers, and as I have previously explained, burdened by an enormous 30K mortgage, we could never have afforded to buy three tickets each week, but we had the pen (of fortune?) and we couldn't discount the possibility that this pen would make us winners! We could afford to pay someone else to scree our floor and paint our walls, and maybe pay off the gigantic mortgage under which we were forever shadowed! But neither of us wanted to give up our own numbers, because of course, they would then be guaranteed to come up. Until a solution to the affordability of three tickets-a-week issue was found (lottery win?) the pen was abandoned.

Given to aimless tom-foolery as we all are in the you-don't-know-how-lucky-you-are days of no children, one evening, the pen surfaced, and made it's way into our bored hands. We decided to see how many times we would have to go through the shake/tip sequence until one of our sets of numbers came up. I don't recall at which point we gave up, but suffice to say we never got our numbers. In fact, not even three of our numbers in any one attempt. For me, this became the point where I decided not to ever panic over losing something I didn't have in the first place. The Grumpster, for all his pessimism continued to ensure the tickets were regularly bought for quite some time after this. I think it all fizzled away once the Wednesday draw was started. £4 per week was too much, even for him.

One day, a couple of years after we gave up on the lottery, we bumped into a friend who was going to the local shop. He was off to collect some lottery winnings. 'Six numbers' he told us! Why was he going to the local newsagent to collect the wonga? Because he had two lines of numbers that he always used, and each had come up trumps for a tenner. His numbers had been chosen as randomly as ours, and I was left feeling that he was one of the unluckiest people I knew, how easily he could have put those six numbers on the same line, but I have a feeling if he had......

Anyway, the original premise for this Blog was that on the phone-in, quite a few people said they would hate to have the amounts of money generated by a lottery win! Are they mad? I would love to have a load of money. All I actually want is a house here in my current location, with enough bedrooms for the boys to have one room each and my daughter to have one with a bit more space, a bedroom for guests, a kitchen big enough for me to put aside my baking while I prepare a healthy lunch (yeah right-but if I had that kitchen I would cook properly!), a room entirely devoted to washing and ironing with a sub-room off that, never to be seen by visitors, where the boys' football boots, enormous school-bags, plethera of coats for various weather-conditions and perhaps a little dog could live....

Yes, I really would be very happy to win the lottery, if only we could get into the habit of buying a ticket!


For now, not in any state of riches, take care. Lucy.

Mr Wenger, you may thank me at your leisure!

Just a quickie. The Grumpster is watching the Arsenal v Porto Champions League game. I am listening in the small, healthy-food/baking-prohibitive kitchen. On my DAB radio. Anyone who is interested in sport and has left 5 Live on whilst watching a match on Terrestrial TV will have noticed that the streaming on a DAB radio is about 2 seconds (maybe more) ahead of that on the TV. I use this fact to help in crucial World Cup games etc by leaving the radio on loud whilst watching to enhance my enjoyment of the sporting experience. When something exciting/terrifying is happening, I drown out the TV commentary and focus on what is happening on the radio ahead of what I can see, thus preventing me from getting too excited by something which may ultimately let me down. In a nutshell, it somehow lessens the disappointment (which comes a lot with the teams I support- Arsenal/Portsmouth/England).

The Grumpster (like most) finds the same thing immensely annoying.  He likes to let hope dwell in his heart. I think it feeds his Grumpy side as he can really moan when it goes belly-up. To avoid irritation tonight, the lounge door has been firmly shut to prevent any spoilers, but our daughter keeps going to see him and leaving the door open. I have therefore, out of the kindness of my heart, kept the radio on a low volume to ensure he enjoys the game 'to the Max'.

However, I had been busy (doing nothing) and wasn't listening to the commentary for a few minutes when the lounge door opened and I could hear The Grumpster pleading with aforementioned youngster to shut the door. I couldn't resist yelling 'Yeah-Go Arsenal!' at the top of my voice to annoy him, and not a word of a lie, When I stopped, the commentator could be heard yelling 'And Arsenal have an equaliser...' My plan had backfired in a weird sort of favourable way! The joke hadn't worked at all, but I took solace in my psychic affect on the Gunners.

So Mr Wenger, read my previous post re: money, and make the cheque payable to........

Lucy

ps-anyone who reads this may be starting to understand why The Grumpster is so grumpy...He's grumpy now as while I have been doing this, the children have left a trail of destruction throughout the house. Time I got going!

Web-love

Why oh why did I think it would be a good idea to sign up for an OU course that involved spreadsheets and creating my own Website??? I have made no secret of the fact that I am not to be combined with most post-war technology yet I persist. I believe my new moblie phone may be to blame. To refresh, I bought a phone called an HTC HD2 which was recommended to me by a friend's husband. He then sold his a week after I bought it, citing the complexity of the phone and the many functions which he would never use as reasons for flogging it on (thus using the remaining 18 months of his contract on the old phone he had been so desperate to replace in the first place). I on the other hand, was able to use the phone most successfully for many of it's recommended uses, and even The Grumpster was calling me names like 'nerdy geek-face'. I think a false sense of communication confidence had overtaken me.

So I needed another 60 points to complete my degree, and signed up for a course called The Environmental Web'. The 'web' part is nothing to do with spiders, more to be associated with the world-wide variety, but Hey! No problem for moi-I own an HTC HD2 and I can take photos on it and upload them to my Facebook page almost instantly. Modern technology has caught up with me, I have joined the communication generation. Computers-schmuters, IT will no longer stand in my way, I can now do anything.

Except anything required of me on my course.

In just under two months, I need to send via the computer (rather than post or even hand delivery at midnight as in the former years of my degree) typed answers to questions on a word document, a spreadsheet of something, and 6 graphs done on spreadsheets. Yes 6! Zipped?  How on earth am I going to manage that??? Before that, I need to participate in an online Tutor-group forum and I tried my bloody hardest and I could NOT log in to the said forum so my contribution is going to be pretty poor. I tried to join all the clever people who had gone in on the course forum to say a little bit about themselves and ended up putting my two-penneth in the middle of someone called Lisa's offering. I can only hope to do something similarly stupid on the tutor-monitored, mark-grabbing forum, just as someone's adding something really profound and claim it as my own. But only if I can work out how to log in.

The course website is something to be feared. In the centre, highlighted in blue, dominating the page is a section which I am going to refer to as my Mother. The course planner. Every chapter, paragraph and activity is listed, week-by-week with a little check box next to each to show your progress. Or not. And because I am such an old lady I don't know whether it is something my Tutor can access to see if I am working hard. I can hardly tell him 'Well I am working so bloody hard at the computer stuff I haven't read the environment bits' Instead I am going to check them off, convincingly, bit-by-bit to look genuine, and then nod knowingly at the day school in March as all the brainboxes and whizzkids discuss the issues associated with the course.

I am also doing my Maths GCSE. We use paper for that. The tutor uses an interactive whiteboard to show us how to do hard sums and we copy the method onto paper. Maths used to be my nemesis, it is fast becoming my friend. I should soon be able to calculate what percentage of my OU course I have been unable to do and express it as a fraction or a decimal. But I won't be able to put it on my course forum....

I must go now as The Grumpster and I are going to watch TV. I will leave him in charge of the remote control.
Lucy.