Blog Day 28 of 30: What Would You Buy?
Hi! We hit our final target for The Water Project yesterday, just in time. By writing a blog or running 3 kilometres every day, the five of us have raised £1,750 worth of clean and sustainable water for families in Sub-Saharan Africa. Nice one.
Today I listened to a song about buying a lottery ticket. For some reason, that has spawned the following thousand words.
When I was young, my family used to have a static caravan at Edgewater Holiday Park in Enniskillen, a small town on the shore of Lough Erne in south-west Northern Ireland. Static caravan parks are odd places. When no one’s around, you might take a walk around the site in the evening and feel like you’re being haunted. Rows upon rows of tarmac with big cuboid hunks of sheet aluminium plopped down at 10-metre intervals on both sides, with occasional neat pockets of grass sparingly allotted to a few of the nicer ones.
Sometimes we’d show up at the caravan park a bit before the Peak Holiday Season started for a day or so, because my dad wanted to fiddle with the heating or my mum wanted to change around some furniture or something. If I ever had a doddle around the place by myself, I’d get on my tiptoes and peer into the other people’s caravans, just to see how the other half live. As it turns out, all static caravans are the same. There’ll be a small circular table in front of a sofa which doubles as a dining area and is upholstered in one of the following two patterns:
There’ll be an open pack of cards, an 18 inch TV, a Superser Mini Portable Gas Heater and a kitchenette with some red and white check flannel curtains on the window above it. Without these key elements, you don’t have a true static caravan.
If you had a little bit of disposable income, what would you buy? Would you get yourself a static caravan? What about if you won the lottery? What would you do then?
My Welsh grandparents would come to the caravan with us if they ever visited and, one Saturday evening, I was brushing my teeth in the plastic sink when I overheard my mum reading the Thunderball numbers out in the next room. Nanny was listening out for the ones which were on her ticket.
“75.”
“Yes.”
“58.”
“Yes.”
“12.”
“…Yes.”
“88.”
“Yes!!!!!! xasdsdsaljhfwjhfdwe”
…it only ended up being four numbers. She was 2 away from £500,000. It was £100 instead, if I remember correctly. Oh well. There’s always next time. I think we all ended up getting a nice steak dinner out of that one. I felt a little bit less guilty when they did the typical grandparent thing and gave me a hug when they were going home while somehow secretly sliding a crumpled up £10 note into my hand. “Don’t tell your parents!” Ok, nanny. My secret stash of sweets was well-stocked after that one.
My mum and dad don’t do the lottery religiously, but it does seem to always come up in conversation. All it takes is for us to drive past a particularly lovely house or change the price filter on the car website from ‘low-to-high’ to ‘high-to-low’ and that famous phrase is uttered by one of them, without fail: “Well, when we win the lottery, we’ll get that one”.
My other granny, the Irish one, was superstitious. Well, maybe she was only a little bit stitious. Either way, one ritual she absolutely stuck to was asking for the same lottery numbers every week. She used to swear blind to us that one time, ages ago, she forgot to do the lottery that week and her numbers ended up getting called out. She could’ve been a millionaire! I was always a bit sceptical of that one, to be honest.
I wonder if it feels different when you’re holding the winning ticket. What would you buy? I’d buy a ticket for the next night and try to win twice. History has shown us that winning the lottery isn’t always the blessing that it seems, though, right? It seems like any time a lottery winner gets news coverage it’s because they’ve pissed all their winnings away on some pyramid scheme or married someone half their age who secretly murdered them or done a load of coke and exposed themselves in public. It never seems to end well. I do sort of know someone who won the lottery. My childhood friend from the caravan site, Jack, his granddad won over a quarter of a million I think. He has a business as an undertaker in Lisburn. That’s not a very fun way to use your winnings, if you ask me, but you can’t knock it. Jack’s family did have a nicer caravan than ours, too, so there’s that.
The National Endowment for Financial Education (NEFE) apparently claim that 70% of lottery winners in the US go bankrupt just a few years after winning. It’s a statistic which is bandied around all sorts of major newspapers. The Washington Post made a fancy article called “Outlook & Perspective: Five Myths About The Lottery”, wherein they dispel the idea that winning can vastly improve people’s lives by wheeling out this NEFE statistic in response. Not only is that stat demonstrably not true, it also was never made by NEFE, which is pretty hilarious since most major news websites who’ve talked about the lottery have had no hesitation in citing it while wagging their finger at lottery players around the world.
This is the kind of Fake News people should really be putting their energy into, if you ask me: it’s incredibly rare that news sites actively make things up, but it is very common for (admittedly overworked and stressed out) copywriters to quickly google a statistic and quote it with no further digging than that, leading to inaccuracies being ignored among some of the biggest newspapers in the world because the writer quoted a source which has the word ‘National’ in it so therefore it must be solid. What a shame.
This has been a bit of a weirdly structured blog today, hasn’t it? Hopefully it’s still legible and alright. Maybe pick up a lottery ticket the next time you see them at the counter. What’s the worst that could happen?
