I never buy a lottery ticket, and I’ll tell you why: when I was about 10 or 11, we took a trip on our family holiday to Bundoran.
e kids were given £5 — an absolute chuffing fortune back then — to do with as we please. A coin-pushing machine in an arcade caught my eye and before I knew it, the fiver was ancient history.
Later on, when I asked my parents to buy me a Garfield pencil case, my mum clearly saw an opportunity to teach me a thing or two about the downside of gambling. “If you didn’t use that machine, you’d be able to buy the pencil case,” she said, mournfully. Anyway, that was the end of me and gambling for a while; all the way right down to the Lotto.
Except this week, I caught the must-be-won fever along with everyone else. I’m not a religious person, but I decided to splash right out on two quick-pick lines for last weekend’s draw, figuring that if it were indeed my divine destiny to win the jackpot, two lines would get me there.
What I wasn’t expecting was the disappointment I felt when the destiny I was so sure was mine (or at the least, that I cosmically deserved) remained at large. My friend, who’d gone big with four lines, was equally disgusted. Much like myself, she seemed to have more than a passing hope that better days were ahead.
What I might do with a massive Lotto jackpot win is one of my favourite idle daydreams. And no wonder. As I write, I am dangerously overdrawn and my credit card has started to sweat. It’s a conversational touchstone at our family gatherings, and we fully believe that our answers to this question tell us a lot about each other.
My father would travel the globe until his air-miles card combusted. My brother swears he would give most of it to charity. I’d go to the Maldives for a month to relax. After that I’d tell no one, and show up to work as though nothing had happened.
My dad has a game plan ready to go in the event of a win: “I’d tell no one about it, and then when someone wins €250,000, I’d tell everyone that I was the winner that week. Then, no one would bother to remark if they saw me in a new car.” His game plan is probably prudent, as it happens.
A few years ago in a work situation, I met a man who had won big in the Lotto. Properly big. “I seriously wish I hadn’t,” he revealed. Sure, he had paid off his mortgage and nicely sorted the future for his children. His plan was to give his kids enough to do something, but not too much that they’d do nothing. His life was comfortable in a way that it never can be without the white noise of mortgage repayments, credit union loads, and so on.
And yet here he was, in the middle of a double work shift and not at all happy about it. He’d lost friends. Family members who had given him a financial leg-up earlier in his life shunned him when he didn’t give them enough money to do nothing. Winning the lottery requires a particular skill-set, strategy and certain disposition, like a well-paid job. Sometimes, just sometimes, it might not be worth it. People miss their old life.
Can you actually imagine winning, though? Looking at your numbers, then looking at the numbers on the TV, and the slow realisation that the numbers match. Each and every last one of them. That same realisation erupting into a screeching, megawatt euphoria. Your familiar life, for better or worse, changing course entirely and dramatically. Being able to plop down €2.5m on a house overlooking the sea, as casually as though you were buying pints. Buying houses for your family. Making their dreams come true. The possibilities. The potential. The complexities.
As I crumpled up my Lotto ticket with the bitterness of someone who was certain they came close to having it all but had paradise cruelly revoked by fate, I thought of the winner of last weekend’s €19m jackpot. This day last week, their lives were heading one way, and now, a whole other existence lies ahead. The thought is of cold comfort to me, back at my desk at 9am on Monday morning. Still, at least I can afford my own Garfield pencil cases now.
