And two: those who refuse to allow the sudden acquisition of millions of pounds to have any impact on their lifestyle whatsoever. One: those who blow the lot in record speed and with a hilarious lack of taste. It’s not just the odds that will now stretch to 45,000,000-to-1, it’s the fact that two kinds of people always seem to win the lottery. The winners who hit the headlines are proof you will never win anyway. The two kinds of people who always seem to win the lotteryīetter to keep quiet. Once you had a proper job, but now you’ll occupy that dubious social spectrum of wealthy people with limited purpose, wedged between The Wags and The Ladies Who Lunch. Henceforward, you will simply be known as a Lotto Winner. And even among your nearest and dearest, it will take industrial-strength magnanimity for people to be chuffed you’ve just come into £12m – unless you offer them an all-expenses jolly to the Maldives, a Range Rover and a pair of Louboutins.Īnd as soon as you’ve appeared in the local paper flanked by a minor celebrity, as you wield an outsize cheque and a glass of bubbly, your former identity will disappear. Before a lotto win, your generosity stretched to getting a round in. Or it can turn the former into the latter. In the words of Spike Milligan: “Money can’t buy friends, but you can get a better class of enemy.” Letting the world know you now have more disposable income than Simon Cowell is a big mistake. Instant multi-millionaires are bombarded with advice on coping with unimaginable wealth.īut why do so many start by ticking the Publicity Box? 'Money can't buy friends, but you can get a better class of enemy Related: Welsh Lottery winners - where are they now The lottery operators do their best to look after those facing seismic life change. That’s the kind of money Greece could do with. A single person in the UK won more than £93m this month. Yet 1970s’ pools scoops can’t quite compare to the filthy lucre of the 21st-century Euro lotto winners. Not even moving from her council house, all she splashed out on was a new coat.
A soft-hearted soul, she ended up buying three-piece suites for half of Gloucestershire. Who really wants to be a multi-millionaire? My late Aunty Rhona won the pools in 1978.Īt the time, her win – shared by a syndicate in her local pub – was a record.īut all it brought her was stress and begging letters.
Mind you, it could ruin the rest of your life if your numbers did come up. Who really wants to be a multi-millionaire? Then you would go home, sit through some awful entertainment show fronted by Dale Winton and one by one those family birthday numbers would pop out of the tombola. One Saturday afternoon the Asda queue would be too long and the ticket wouldn’t be bought. Statisticians say sticking to the same numbers makes no difference to your odds of winning.īut I could never use the same numbers because the potential trauma of missing a draw is too massive. This is apparently known as “the psychology of entrapment.” The dumbest tactic is surely using the same numbers every week. It doesn’t matter that lightning strikes, getting run over and death by shark bite are more statistically-likely destinies than a winning lottery ticket.īoris Johnson may have dubious conversations with London cabbies, but he was on to something when he called the lotto “a tax on stupidity”.
Yet still we dream with every lucky dip and biro mark on the slip of pink paper. They reckon that their new “Millionaire Raffle” will see more winners of £1m, even if their chances of matching six numbers for the big one are more remote than ever. Under the “enhancements” revealed this week, Lotto players will have to select their winning numbers from a pool of 59 rather than 49. To add to my personal devastation of achieving just two numbers in last Saturday’s draw, Camelot has since announced sweeping changes that will see the odds of winning the lottery lengthen from one in 14,000,000 to one in 45,000,000. Indeed, despite influencing my ticket purchase, The Syndicate isn’t particularly good marketing for The Lotto.įrom kidnapped daughters to criminal skeletons being sprung out of cupboards, nothing but catastrophe has befallen each character since they hit the jackpot. Still we dream with every lucky dip and biro mark This logic proved to be as dodgy as Lenny Henry’s character’s mathematical predictions in the BBC melodrama. I thought it Could Be Me because I’d watched The Syndicate. Last Saturday I bought a lottery ticket for the first time in 10 years.
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