A Lotto Dream, or Nightmare?



Over the past few weeks Europe has been gripped in a state of lottery fever, as the EuroMillions jackpot reached the dizzying heights of £160,000,000, sparking stampedes to the newsagents in the hunt for the elusive winning numbers. On Wednesday night, that jackpot after 14 consecutive rollovers was won, by a Scottish couple from Falkirk, who stated upon winning “The next steps are going to be the most difficult... with great wealth comes great responsibility”.

It would take an average man, on an average salary of £30,000, thirty three years to earn £1,000,000 and 536 years to earn the figures won by the aforementioned Scottish couple from Falkirk, so you can understand quite easily why people are in such a frenzy buying tickets to earn such a fortune.

Stephanie and I have been playing the lottery for nearly two years, two pound a week, same line, same numbers, same result - nothing! We have won £10 once in the entire time, which came with much fanfare only two weeks ago. We had started to think that the numbers were cursed, or the lottery website was ignoring us. But nonetheless, winning the lottery would change our lives, but would it actually change it for the better? If we’d have won that EuroMillions jackpot, what would we have done with vast amounts of money?

We could leave it in the bank, live our normal lives, pay ourselves the same monthly salary but not have to go to work for the rest of our lives and let subsequent generations do the same until the pot runs dry. Or we could create our own lottery by picking 160 friends from our Facebook list and give them a million pound each, which would be a two finger salute to any strange Auntie who had decided to block us. We could put Oliver in private school and give him the greatest education money could buy, with external tutorship so he can learn languages and play the piano, drums or guitar. We could travel the world during the school holidays, spending lazy summers on a Greek, Pacific or Caribbean island. I could spend half of the winnings on Gillingham Football Club and wipe out the clubs debts, help them get promotion to the Premier League on a tide of money built upon weak foundations. We could build the ultimate mansion in the Kent countryside with roller coasters in bedrooms and water slides that put Disney to shame. We could become space tourists in one of Richard Branson’s intergalactic spaceships or emigrate to Australia and live out our days by the beach.

But then, that’s the fantasy of it all isn’t it? The reality I’m sure is far different, real money, real choices. How much do you give to your siblings, are we being too generous, or will they still think we’re being tight? Do we give to Aunties and Uncles who we never see, but to the friends that we do? Do we give it to both, just because we can? Do we give money to a person we know would probably use it drink him/herself to death, or walk away from their family on the back of their new found wealth? Who gave us the right to make those kinds of choices? What charities to we donate to, the ones closest to us, or the most poignant? How do we say no to an opportunity knowing that we have such wealth behind us? Will putting the children through private education detract them from the reality of the lives we faced growing up, the not getting everything we asked from Father Christmas, the holiday’s to Wales and Scotland that we loved and enjoyed, but overlooked now that the money has made the world our oyster?

So that quote again, at the press conference, “The next steps are going to be the most difficult... with great wealth comes great responsibility” - rings so true, and if you think about it, would winning such money actually make your life any richer?

If I have ambitions to want to be able to write, I need to look at people at their circumstances, how their characters react to the changes around them. How would one person cope with a death of a loved one, or how would they cope with an unexpected windfall?

The reality, at least for us, is that it doesn’t really matter, because however much we play, the odds are against us. It has never, or will never happen to us - but we can still dream can’t we?

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