Of course I’m worried for my daughter as she travels to London, but I don’t want her to change her plans

WINNING the lottery can ruin your life. Just look at Mary Walsh, the hairdresser from Galway, who hasn’t had a minute’s good luck since she collected that €3.38million cheque six years ago. Almost immediately, it appears, war broke out in the family over who was promised what.

Back in February, she found herself spending seven full days as a defendant in the High Court – not an experience you’d wish on your very worst enemy – while her stepson sued for his share of the money. He won €565,000, plus costs, and Mrs Walsh had to listen to some very harsh words from the judge, words that were splashed all over the national papers and words that will stick.

Fractured

And now she’s facing a second High Court claim from another relative for a bigger share. At this rate, Mrs Walsh could end up far worse off than before she won, with vast sums gone in legal costs and awards, and her family fractured. And she wouldn’t be the first winner to have her peace of mind, her security, her relationships, her whole life upended by a lottery jackpot.

It could happen to any of us, too. One day your life could be perfectly normal and content, and the next you could be facing a very different future, all in the twinkling of an eye. You could be the one in several million picked out by fate.

Worrying about getting caught up in a terrorist attack is exactly the same as worrying about winning the lottery. The only difference is that your chances of winning the lottery, even if you only buy the occasional ticket, are still much stronger.

Even if you’d been in central London on Saturday night, even if you’d been among the tens of thousands who crossed London Bridge and strolled around Borough Market and socialised in the pubs and restaurants, your chances of being among the seven unfortunate victims were still tiny.

Even if you’d been right there on London Bridge when those cowardly thugs ploughed their van into passersby, your chance of injury or death was higher than usual, of course, but the odds of escaping unhurt were still very much in your favour.

Nobody hands back a gift of a lottery ticket, or refuses to join a work syndicate or avoids the lure of the quick-pick, because they’re afraid that winning will wreak havoc on their lives. And nobody, I really hope, has returned an airline ticket to London, or cancelled a visit to the extraordinary city we are so fortunate to have on our doorstep, because of what happened on Saturday night. You can look at the randomness of the Manchester bombing, or the London outrages, or the Bataclan massacre or the truck attack in Sweden or the Nice promenade slaughter, and you can indeed conclude that nowhere is safe any more.

Or you can flip that conclusion on its head and decide that everywhere is safe.

If there is no rhyme or reason to the targets of these vile lunatics, then there is no rhyme or reason to the places they don’t hit, either. There’s no point in avoiding a pop concert or a department store or an airplane, because you might just as easily be at risk walking down your own high street.

Tourism

You might, for sure, find yourself at the event where they strike, but the chances are far greater that you’ll be in one of the other hundreds of thousands of such events, or walking down one of the millions of miles of city streets, that go entirely untroubled every day. And you might, for sure, hold the winning lottery ticket, but it’s immeasurably more likely that you’ve spent a fiver on a worthless piece of paper.

I was watching the television with my daughter Camille on Saturday night when the first reports of the attacks began to filter through. She starts her Leaving Cert tomorrow, along with tens of thousands of other teenagers and like many of them, she’s looking forward to a holiday when it all ends. Instead of Magaluf or Ibiza, though, she’s heading to London with her pal Sophie to do all the big tourist spots.

They’ll stay with my brother and his wife (who was actually on call in London Bridge Hospital on Saturday night) and they’ll do the London Eye, and Buckingham Palace, and Madame Tussauds and the Aquarium and – our must-see on every single trip to London – the Dungeons.

They’ll be among crowds of tourists and sightseers and Londoners going about their daily business, on the Tube and the buses. And you can’t check every rucksack among a bustling city throng for a bomb or a gun or a knife, no more than you can check every heart for malice nor every mind for evil intent. But nor can you spend your life worrying about what might be lurking in the next man’s back pack or the next woman’s head. What you can do, though, is reassure yourself that the streets of London are alive with hopeful, high-spirited, wonderstruck visitors much like yourself, or else ordinary city dwellers troubled only by their ordinary worries and that, exactly like yourself, all they want is to get through their day and return safely to their loved ones at the end of it.

Opportunity

As the grim news ticked by on the screen on Saturday, we talked about Camille’s trip to London, and her only concern was whether we’d worry, the mammies at home. And we will, because that’s what mammies do, whether your kid is taking a bus into town alone for the first time, or going on a first solo holiday, or doing the Leaving Cert.

Most of all, though, we’ll be thrilled that they’re getting an opportunity we’d never have imagined when we were their age, a time when you practically had to sell a kidney to fund a flight to London. We’ll be grateful, yet again, that one of the most iconic, amazing, awesome cities on the planet – equalled only in myth and radiance by Paris and New York – is a €59 plane ride away, and that we’ve so many friends and family there that it feels like a second home.

We could say that we won’t let these deranged ‘terrorists’ – basically psychopaths who’ve found a like-minded community online – change our plans because that’d be letting them win, but that’s not the only reason.

We won’t change our plans because we know, statistically, the most dangerous part of the girls’ journey will probably be the car ride to the airport. We won’t change our plans because the risk of being caught up in an incident is so tiny that it isn’t worth a moment’s worry.

If you’ve never booked a holiday in anticipation of winning a jackpot, why cancel one in anticipation of an equal long shot, a terrorist attack? Yes, a trip to London carries a slightly higher risk but then, buying a second lottery ticket increases your chances of winning by 100%, but you still wouldn’t tell your boss where to stick his job. Of course, just like that lottery slogan, it could be you. But again just like the lottery, it almost certainly will not.