I've got some exciting news!

Of course I haven’t, that would be far too exciting. But that’s exactly what the national lottery tell me about my ticket every so often.

It’s probably my fault. Maybe it would help if I got off my arse and actually went to the shop and bought my ticket. But then again, maybe not. The thought of standing in a queue behind six people buying their whole weekly shopping, remains just a thought as it will never become reality. Even if I managed to get past the ‘doing my weekly shop in a 24 hour store when it costs ten times more than the supermarket’ brigade, the whole painful process of buying a lottery ticket would still remain. I would inventibly have to watch aunt Sue being told to fill in her boxes again, as for the fifth time, she had circled, not crossed, seven numbers, not six. I would also probably have to hear the delightfully endearing conversations like “Oh, yes, I always pick those numbers, they are my grandsons ages!”.

So that’s why I do the lottery online, I can buy as many tickets as I want, for as far in the future as I want and, whenever I want. I don’t have to worry about my ticket getting wet in the rain, I don’t have to watch the incredibly boring Lottery Show every week and, most importantly, I don’t have to go back into that 24 hour store to get my winnings.

Which reminds me, there are a number of people that actually do that. As I’m rushing in to get some chewing gum whilst rushing for the bus, there always happens to be a character who is unearthing crinkled lottery tickets from their pockets, passing them sequentially to the shop assistant and saying “Has that one won?”. “No Sir. “What about this one? “. “No”. “And this one”. This normally goes on for about five minutes, at which point I feel like saying “Statistically, you chances of winning the jackpot are 14 million to 1, in fact the chance of winning the smallest prize is 40 to 1, in that case, the chance is that none of your have stained, half chewed, lottery tickets would have won, just let me pay for my chewing gum and we can forget this never happened, why don’t you just watch that annoying lottery programme to find out for yourself anyway?”. Of course I don’t, I give him the ‘better luck next time’ look and proceed to miss my bus.

So, bearing in mind the statistics, when I do get an email from the lottery after the draw, it is quite exciting. What could this exciting news be? A million? Or even just a tenner? That will do. It was the sort of ‘exciting news’ that your boss has for you on a Monday, like the air conditioning has been fixed, or the ‘exciting news’ that your mum used to say to you, “We’ve got sprouts for dinner tonight instead of Cauliflower!”. Yes, the exciting news that Camelot were so keen to tell me out my ticket? It was…………”I have been given a free ticket for the next draw”. Wow. All my Christmas’s had come at once.

Between seeing the ‘Exciting news about your ticket” subject on my email, and opening the email, a mere twenty seconds, I had prematurely planned what was going to be happening with the money, which shade of blue for the Aston Martin, who was getting what in the family, that I would tick the ‘no publicity’ option on the box, I would stick out my job to the end as a matter of courtesy, where I would be buying the house, deciding which football club to buy. This was followed by the countering thoughts “of course they would never email if I won big”. Besides, I wouldn’t be writing this if I had won, I would have long gone by now.