The competition addict who’s won everything in her house – right down to the kitchen mop!
AS THE courier van pulls up outside her front door, Kim Searle jumps to her feet with a squeak of excitement. The driver hands her a white package. Holding her breath, eyes shining with excitement, she eagerly rips it open.
Out pops a printer cartridge in its dull grey plastic shrink wrap package that she’d ordered few days earlier. Kim heaves a disappointed sigh. ‘ Oh well, better luck next time,’ she smiles.
And there’s a very good chance she will have better luck next time, because Kim has been winning competitions — for all sorts of prizes — for 25 years. Barely a day goes by without some freebie being delivered to her door.
She’s won prizes to the value of £ 100,000, including a lavish trip to Disneyland and a canteen of goldplated cutlery. Yet she still gets the same adrenaline rush whenever she sees the postman, whether he’s bringing her the holiday of a lifetime or merely some free dog food for her three rescue collies, Buster, Monty and Skye.
This week, she’s anticipating the arrival of Lancome moisturiser and a toy chicken — and she’s thrilled about that.
‘It’s not about the prize,’ she says. ‘It’s about winning. I get really excited. Even opening a pot of face cream or a bottle of shampoo gives me a buzz. And everyone likes to get something for free.’
Bookseller Kim, 51, is no idle dabbler in Sudoku and s pot- t he - di f f erence contests. One of Britain’s most dedicated competition addicts, she enters up to 100 every day and expects to net at least two or three prizes every week.
‘My brain has been rewired: competition, competition, competition,’ she laughs. ‘I spot them everywhere.’ Kim scrounges tokens from friends’ cereal packets, rips out entry forms from magazines in the doctor’s surgery and switches grocery brands if a rival product is offering a prize.
‘And I always enter if I see a competition in a shop. Most people don’t have time to fill in their details, so if you bother to do it, you’re virtually guaranteed to win a prize.’
THE size of her haul has meant she and husband Dave, 50, had to move to a bigger house with a garage that can accommodate the fridge-freezer she won. In fact, walking into her cottage in rural Powys, is a bit like how I imagine the back rooms at Argos to look: in the hall stands a giant box over flowing with her latest prizes. On top — a bizarre piece de resistance — is a shiny red Vileda mop and bucket.
Still, to Kim this is no ordinary mop and bucket. It is a free mop and bucket, and as she looks at it, her eyes glitter like those of a child presented with a giant lollipop.
‘You had to put a comment about why you’d like it , ’ she says wistfully. ‘I just said: “Three dogs.” It did the trick.’
Underneath are designer men’s shirts she says Dave would never wear, a Perspex clock, several pairs of odour-control socks, a collection of bizarre books (including an illustrated guide to box-making using a spiral saw) and numerous pieces of children’s l uggage adorned with hedgehogs and toadstools (she has no children).
Kim has also got five ‘really naff’ quilted jackets, still in their plastic packaging, which are destined for the charity shop.
But there’s been useful stuff, too: holidays a- plenty, Venice and Barcelona to name but two.
She also won her toaster, coffee machine, kettle and sandwichmaker, and her bedroom furniture, all of it, down to the mattress cover.
Even the T- shirt she’s wearing when we meet was bought with a prize M&S voucher.
There’s more booty in the sitting room: a 42in flatscreen TV, a PlayStation . . . Surveying it all is a 4fttall Winnie the Pooh bear, still with its tags on. ‘That was from Toys R Us about ten years ago,’ she says. ‘It came through the door in a massive box and I didn’t have an inkling what it was.’ Now that was an exciting delivery day.
But why is a middle-aged woman with no children giving house room to a giant teddy, for heaven’s sake?
‘I love him!’ she protests. ‘And whatever I win, I feel grateful.’
The prizes Kim can bear to part with are offered to friends and, if there are no takers, she sells them on eBay. Even so, the mountain keeps growing.
Petite and softly spoken, Kim comes across as eminently sane and sensible. She started ‘comping’, as the aficionados call it, after developing cervical cancer in her early 20s, which sadly left her unable to have children.
Three major operations left Kim confined to bed, and when she had read the magazines her friends had brought, she kept herself entertained by entering the competitions in them.
After she recovered, she carried on. ‘It was harder in those days: there was no computer, no social media, everything was done by post or phone and it was more sloganbased so I just did ten or 15 a day.’
Her first win, in 1989, was a microwave, which she carried off by coming up with the pithy slogan ‘fast lane food’.
‘ Then I won two f l i ghts to Australia and 100 bottles of Cypriot wine,’ she says. Not much use to a woman who doesn’t drink, but her friends pitched in to help.
Kim is a determined and driven woman. She was in the Territorial Army for several years and ran five miles a day. Meanwhile, she built a successful career in sales, ending up as business development manager f or a U. S. software company, where she met Dave.
Then her health deteriorated again and last November she had a serious car accident that left her with brain damage and balance problems. She had to be taught how to walk again and is still not allowed to drive.
Many of us, in her situation, would bemoan our bad luck. Kim, by contrast, makes herself feel lucky by entering competitions.
‘This is my way of staying happy, positive and communicative. If I was well, I’d be working full-time, I’d be out, socialising, at the gym. Instead, this is my hobby. It keeps me looking to the future. And I’m contributing to the household, giving us treats we might not have otherwise.’
It also allows her to play fairy godmother to others. Kim is back from a birthday trip to Folkestone, where she treated three friends to spa treatments courtesy of a batch of vouchers.
She enters competitions to concerts and gives the tickets to her ten godchildren.
‘They text or Facebook me from the concerts so I can share that time with them and I know they’ve been able to do that through me. I still get to feel I’m part of it.’
The day of a full-time ‘compo’ begins in bed: Kim checks Facebook from her laptop to see if she’s won anything. After breakfast, she goes online to scan her emails for more possible wins.
Then, once she’s tackled any customer service issues relating to her book business, she enters her first batch of competitions — normally the sort that need only a name and address. ‘I whizz those off and forget about it.’
EVERY lunchtime, she s pends 15 minutes entering more Facebook competitions online. ‘ Usually I just have to click “like” and make a little comment.’ The major effort is reserved for the evening, when she’ll sit with her laptop for a couple of hours while watching TV, urged on by husband Dave. Kim even enters competitions in the middle of the night if she can’t sleep.
Thirty a day is her minimum, and she can enter up to 200 at weekends, which she reserves for the more complicated entries that demand a slogan or a poem.
‘I really enjoy doing them — I can take my time to be more creative and I’m learning at the same time. They keep my brain active.’
A poem she dashed off recently netted her tea for two at the Ritz.
What’s her secret? ‘Be positive and funny,’ she says. ‘ They’re usually looking for the comedy element.’
Does she worry that her hobby might spiral out of control? ‘I don’t go on bingo sites or anything where I’d have to pay money,’ she says.
Kim no longer plays the Lotto after realising the money she spent on tickets would be better invested i n postage and magazines for ordinary competitions.
What about when she’s on holiday — is the enforced abstinence hard to handle? She grins. ‘I enter on a PlayBook tablet that I won.’
Two dream prizes elude her. ‘A supermarket trolley dash would be awesome,’ she says.
‘And I’d love to win a 4x4 car — we get snowed in every year. I’ve a friend who’s also a competition addict and she’s won a car. That means it’s possible, and I will, too.’
Inspired by her example, I head home with a cheap magazine promising lavish prizes. It’s not my usual reading material and I’m not even sure I want nursery toys, let alone vouchers for a plus-size store.
Even so, I feel a faint thrill as I put my details into the website. I have a feeling the competition bug may have claimed another victim.