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.