It could be you ...but it’s NEVER me!
THINGS you really don’t want to know how much money you’ve spent on over the years No 1029...
The National Lottery has got to be RIGHT up there.
It began in the mid-90s and has rolled on ever since, creating scores of millionaires and multi-millionaires along the way. Critics argue it’s a tax on the poor. But that’s not entirely true. Not long after it started, yours truly interviewed a fella in Manchester who’d won about ten million. He was delighted, he said. But it wasn’t like he needed the money.
He and his business partner, with whom he shared the jackpot, were already millionaires thanks to their joint ownership of a wooden pallet business.
This revelation did not make him popular.
But not nearly as unpopular as when, just months later, the stuffy pair landed ANOTHER hefty win between them, albeit in the £100,000s rather than millions.
Throughout that period, I also met a £3m+ winner from the south coast – a seaside holiday resort cleaner – who planned to treat herself to a new Mini Metro.
No doubt her new drive would get her to work more comfortably.
Those blocked urinals won’t scrub themselves!
Then there was the bachelor bloke in Liverpool who was still living with his parents in his 30s or 40s.
He landed around £14m and knew instantly what to do with his windfall – a new shed, with lots of shiny new gardening and DIY equipment.
These things, I realised at the time, were there to offer a reminder of how much God clearly despises me.
In recent years, though, thanks to the ever-invasive internet, it’s actually worse.
Like many, I’ve got the National
Lottery app on my phone. And every month, because it’s like magic money, I transfer a few quid into it so I can play throughout the month. It promises that should you win, they’ll alert you straight away. But you never really believe it, as the notifications never come. So you start physically checking in any case. And sure enough, the reason there are no notifications is because you haven’t matched the right number of balls. And back you go into that deep, dark depression, especially as you were so certain of a win that you’d held off on your energy bills while waiting for the megabucks. As if to hammer home the message, we learned last week of a couple from Gloucestershire who scooped a whopping £184.2m on EuroMillions – the biggest ever prize won in the UK. And how did they learn of their good fortune?
Bounty
Via the f**king app, of course.
Imagine that? In among all that other crap we get bombarded with, in the middle of the headlines and weather updates, a quick message to say you’d just won unimaginable riches.
Cleverer people than I, which doesn’t take much, are now pointing out the true value of this unexpected bounty.
With the right accountant, Joe Thwaite and his missus need never touch the lump sum, as the interest it will earn them every single day will make your eyes water.
After tax (you only pay tax on interest on a lottery win) they will “earn” upwards of £100,000 a week alone. It could be you, they say. But it wasn’t. It was them.