27.01.06 1.21 AM

Hi guys. I have an interesting predicament which i would greatly appreciate your help with. The story begins innocently enough in a local campus store with a make shift sign saying 'play our lottery or we will lose it'. Well, when some one asks you for help, my mother always taught me to do what you can. After emptying out my pockets i have a little over four pounds. I go in and purchase four scratch cards (i'm a busy man, i don't have time to wait for the daddy lotto) and a pack of softmints for lunch (it's now all i can afford.)

One boring lecture later (in which i learnt about the ominously sounding case - The Italian Banana Affair) i manage to convince Dave to buy me a pint, so we go off to the pub and i set about the serious task of scratching off the tickets, and most likely turning the once promising cards into small rectangles of paper trash. The first card gives me nothing. No surprise there. I begin to wonder if this was really such a good plan. However, my faith is restored when i win 4 squid on the next one. Now whatever happens i haven't lost anything, and how silly do i feel for doubting the world. I feel even more like a tit when over the course of the next two cards i win 13 more of your English pounds. That's seventeen in total. Good form if you ask me, and for an instant i'm quite excited, until it's the next round, then the next and the lottery gets forgotten entirely.

The tickets lay untouched on my floor for about a week when as i tidy up (much to the delight of my flat mates, who i think may have even bought champagne to celebrate the occasion) i come across the tickets. Now to me it seems obvious what i should do with them. This is not only seventeen pounds that i shouldn't really even have but it's seventeen pounds i'd forgotten about. Let me surmise. If i keep these seventeen pounds I'll be living on borrowed money. The shop still needs business. I can't be bothered to tidy any more. I like gambling. I think we all know where this is going...

I got a couple of odd looks as i slap the winning tickets on the counter and demand seventeen more, but i'm more or less used to getting these kind or surreptitious glances anyway now. I think it might be my face. Anyway, i walk out of the shop a proud owner of seventeen pounds worth of new scratch cards. For those of you who are good at math (or those of you who enjoy a sly 'alf) you may have worked out that this is approximately (and by that i mean exactly) 10 pints of the finest Carling money can buy (or is that a contradiction in terms?) I waste two out of these ten pints as a slowly and deliberately scratch off the new tickets. And for the record, does everyone evaluate everything by how many pints they could buy? Or is it just a slippery slope to a drinking problem; or much worse it's a slippery slope to drinking the insanely cheap (even though it's cheap for a damn good reason) Special Brew...

Firstly i have to get through the two double tickets. The first one (which promises me a obscene amounts of money or a car) is a complete duff. A worrying start. That's not just a 1.70 carling i've lost but a 1.95 Grolsh. Things are looking down. However, the world taught me a lesson about doubting it before and yet again i fail to take this on board. Straight away i win three quid on the first half of the second card. Now, i just need one more and i'm even with what i originally spent. I'd be a happy man. Not quite as happy as i was however when the second half gave me two pounds. Now i had 5. I'm already in profit. Things are looking up. My pint sipping intensified during the next few cards as i get nothing except a pound. I have six left and only six pounds won. The odds are looking grim. And yet as i start to fear the worst, the next card goes above and beyond the call of duty. It comes up trumps, comes up good to the value of ten pounds. I now have a hard earned sixteen pounds. I can almost taste the possibility of actually making profit out of the reinvesting into scratch cards, i can almost imagine myself smiling at the people who said i was 'crazy' and 'odd' and who ignore me when i tries to insist that one has to speculate to accumulate. But i'm a wary man, loathed to tempt fate. And yet it appears it just might be too late. The next three yield nothing but a slightly disappointing feeling. It's all down to the last two cards. The penultimate one gives me 1 pound. I'm exactly even. It's all or nothing on the last card. Slowly, and with a shaking hand (well, clearly not but i want to try to add suspense to this incredibly self indulgent e-mail) i reveal the numbers which will reveal my destiny, my fate (see, isn't it more exciting now i'm using cool words?) 500, 2012, 50, 16, 1, 2012. Things aren't looking good. But low and behold, with the next two i get another 16 and another 1. Two pound symbols with one last chance, one last roll of the dice, and one last number. I think i lady next to me, and to a lesser extent even Dave was a little shocked as i leapt form my chair, needlessly excited about merely winning a pound. After all, that's only equivalent to a shot of house whiskey. But it's more than that. Not only does it put my tally at eighteen pounds, officially taking me to my highest profit yet, but it reaffirms that the way to live is to clearly make it up as you go along and have a giggle. You can't win them all, but i sure got this one beat...

So what has this entirely pointless e-mail been about i hear you practically screaming. Yes it some ways it was about me not wanting to do my seminar prep that now lies neglected to one side. And yes in some ways it was about me feeling better because i haven't talk to any of you in ages. But really i want to know what to with the 5 lottery tickets that are in my pocket, totaling eighteen pounds in value.

Does the one extra pound go into a proper lotto ticket? Do they all go into proper lotto tickets? DO i do it all again (although this time clearly lose the lot?) Who knows? Who cares. Let the people decide.

Email me back before Wednesday and i'll do whatever is most popular. Now i feel that right now i have to warn you not to simply click the reply button. I'm going to have to ask you to send it to my hotmail account and not here. This is simply my uni account (meaning i never check it) and i'm only sending it from here as for some reason i can't send out from hotmail (rubbish, what am i paying them for) Oh, and if no one replies i will burn them. And you think i'm joking....







RESPONSES……..


From : Adam Rancid
Written in pain, written in awe, by a puzzled man who questioned what we were here for says:
Be a king amongst men and do it! You know it makes sense! you could be
richer then your wildest dreams, or failing that have enough to buy a
round of drinks, or failing that become a quivering husk of a man when
your dreams of winning are dashed upon the cruel cold rocks! Don't be a
pansy and think 'ooo but i could buy a veritable feast with 18 pounds'
because you may be passing up on that golden opportunity of a life
time, yes, enough money to buy a house of lard, nay a mansion!


From : Dave ‘let’s cycle to Chichester’ Shirman
Lord Meat says:
go out for a drink with a mate with half, give half to a charity or to 9 homeless people, it's cold out


From : Sophia Koullas
Sent : 31 January 2006 20:31:35
To : thelardfather@hotmail.com
Subject : W0401641@uea.ac.uk???
My adivce to you is this, luck has been kind to you not once, oh no..but twice. Do not feel that he will be kind to you again. So from me to you...Take the god damn money and run to the nearest public house ( preferably refreshers!) and drink those lovely £18.
Do the right thing!!


From :
Sent : 31 January 2006 05:49:53
To : thelardfather@hotmail.com
Subject : Lady Luck Keep a four squid bank, and keep re-investing. If you hit it big my following my advice, then I would like a 10% cut of the winnings. It is purely optional, but highly recommended.


From : "Emma Muspratt"
Subject: RE: lady luck, a king amongst men....
Date: Tue, January 31, 2006 6:13 pm
To: W0401641@uea.ac.uk hello my dear sweet lard how are you? still reeling from your unbelievable daliance with the beautiful lady luck?! personally...not being a gambler myself and never having bought a lottery ticket of ANY kind...scratch card or otherwise...i think you should split the 6 evenly between full blown lotto tickets and scratch cards...that way you're more likely to strike it lucky with the scatch cards, but are also in with a chance of a BIG WIN on the lotto!hows that? speak to you soon baby doll...






03.02.06

11.37 AM

The damage is done. The decision is made. My bed is now officially made and it's up to me to lie in it (though if anyone wants to join me you can apply at the end of this e-mail.) It is, i believe now 'go time'. I currently have 18 pounds worth of lottery tickets laid out before me.

Now i know what some of you will be thinking. But there was just too much variation from everyone who replied (that is, those of you worldly people who bother to check there junk mail folders.) The advice ranged from keeping it all (Soph), keeping all but the origanal four pounds and keep going hoping to strike it rich (Sheets), keeping half and giving half to a homeless person (Shirman) and simply putting it all back in (Adam). In fact, i think Adams advice in his exact words were :

Be a king amongst men and do it! You know it makes sense! you could be
richer then your wildest dreams, or failing that have enough to buy a
round of drinks, or failing that become a quivering husk of a man when
your dreams of winning are dashed upon the cruel cold rocks! Don't be a
pansy and think 'ooo but i could buy a veritable feast with 18 pounds'
because you may be passing up on that golden opportunity of a life
time, yes, enough money to buy a house of lard, nay a mansion!

and i have to say it is his advice that i enventually ended up taking. Whether that was a good idea or not remains to be seem. As i was buying the new tickets today i didn't have the lucky feeling that i've become so attached to. Gone was that little spark, that feeling of magic, and whether that's down to a preminition of doom, or to the much more likely fact that the last two attempts to 'earn' money involved a certain ammount of alcohol will i'm sure soon be resolved.

Like i say i currently have 18 pounds worth of tickets, unscratched in front of me. I am currently worth 9.230769 (ish!) pints of Grolsh. I just hope they represent the pints i'm going to be drinking to celebrate rather than those which i'll need to drown my sorrows.

Perhaps i'll let you know how it goes.









13.07 PM

all good things must end i guess....

It's funny how the world seems to balance itself itself. I started with four pounds as you remember way back and have after hitting the dizzying height of eighteen of your finest Sterling i have ended up with a rather simular (and somewhat meagre) fiver. Slightly disappointing, but still a profit of a pound in the long run. Down, right down, but not yet out.

Despite a great plan from Sheets, which i believe was to see how many times i could circulate the winnings before i ran out of luck entirely abd lost it all (so far there have been three cycles) i just can't bring myself to do it. The deal this time is is that all my winnings from these scatch cards is going be pumped right into the big Euro Lottery tonight, in which to be honest i'm sure i'll see the last few pounds of my winnings dissapear in a puff of smoke of failed dreams, and fleeting, past glories (that's right, y'all better me giving me some sympathy right now... :) )

No, in truth i'm not that upset. I've still got three tickets in the big one tonight, and with the change left over i'll buy myself 50 pence of good Karma, at least someone on the streets tonight can buy themselves a cup of tea, i hear it's going to be a cold one.

Anyway, that as they say is that. The somewhat long and undoubtedly pointless story of the shop that needed help - a cautionary tale of what you can miss if you do the sensible thing too often.
And there the lesson endeth :) I hope you're all as lucky as i have been this week, but right now i'm off.

Wish me luck for tonight. You can't win them all, but i could really do with winning this one....















RESPONSES:


From: "Emma Muspratt"
em... says:
lol. No-one could do what you do with a few lottery tickets…



From : Dave ‘let’s cycle to Chichester’ Shirman
Sent : 03 February 2006 15:11:25
To : thelardfather@hotmail.com
Subject : RE: read this email second

You're a cock. x