Not Winning the National Lottery

I will be back here in June, its a grand place

near Inverness

Once a week I buy a Euro millions lottery ticket on a Friday and a national lottery ticket on a Saturday. Now you might say that these days since they sneakily added extra numbers as well as increasing the price to two pounds, the odds of winning as so long that it is almost pointless doing it. Well I would entirely agree with you except for one small issue which now has me trapped. You see since the lottery started a few years ago, probably a few more than I think. I have always used the same numbers on the grounds that based on the principles of probability I would win a modest sum sometime in the next thousand years.  Well that would have been true until they added all these extra draws and then added extra numbers, which now means the principles of probability state that I am more likely to win a tap dancing competition on the moon that win the lottery in the next five hundred thousand years even if I bought a thousand tickets a week.

I refuse to buy more tickets but if I don’t buy my ticket on Friday and Saturday how would I feel if the numbers I use and have always used actually win . . . . I would not be a happy chap so I am well and truly trapped not so much by the dream of winning but by the dread of not winning on the basis that I might actually discover that my numbers did come up on a week I did not have a ticket. I bet (no pun intended) there is a fancy technical name for this but sadly I don’t know it.

O course we all have our little dreams about what we would do if we won the lottery although I do have to point out we should all pursue those dreams as best we can and not think . . . . When I win the lottery I will. . . . . As I have stated you could wait many thousands of years.  But even so, I do have my little dreams about what I might do if I won.  I would not move house I am lucky to live in a nice place but I might buy a small second home near the coast up in Scotland. I love the sea and worked offshore while living in Scotland so it sort of makes sense to rekindle some of those old memories of being an old seadog leaping from boat to ship to platform to crane barge and back again.  And although it’s a stereotypical thing to do I would buy a posh new car. No not some stupid supercar that you cant even get a cat basket in, but a decent 4X4, I have owned a couple in my life and in both cases they were great but as fickle as a car can be, and if I was not nice they would do odd things. They never actually let me down and the V8 Range Rover was a hell of a beast as long as I never ventured far from a petrol station.  It once saved a wedding by ferrying everyone between the church and a house deep in the winter snow.  Sadly Range Rovers have gone all footballers’ wives in their image these days so no good to me.

I would also probably have to get a haircut as it is likely I would be told I could afford a decent haircut, and I suspect protesting would not convince my family that I would be much better as a wild reclusive and slightly mad lottery winner. No they would point at my shiny new posh car and say . . . You can’t drive that with hair that looks like an electrocuted ferret that has been run over a few times by a bus. . . . . . . . You see there are some things even winning the lottery can’t change . . . . Remember money will not make you happy, but it can make it easier to be happy you just need to know what is important.  And even if you do win I suspect you will find you still have dreams that you will be chasing it is sort of what keeps us going. . . . .