How To Win The Lottery

Have you ever had one of those occasions where you’ve told a white lie and then the lie has kind of come true?

It’s like you made it happen. Like saying it out loud to another person made it real. Birthed it into the reality of the material universe. I spoke therefore it was.

Well, that happened a couple of times last week. I’m not saying I fib all the time but, you know, needs must. I white lie all the time while I’m at work. It starts with that sunny smile I paint on my face every morning and continues throughout every word and deed as the day progresses. We all do that, right? To get the bucks?

So it got me thinking. And thinking got me a desperately lame epiphany.

Maybe I could use this universal mechanism to win the jackpot on the lottery. I mean, for £1 a go, it’s worth a shot, right?

So I told my wife and kids that I was going to win the lottery jackpot this Saturday. No ifs or buts. I was buying the winning ticket. I told myself the same when I went into the newsagents and handed over my smirking pound coin. I am buying the winning ticket. I looked at the other customers in the queue ahead of me buying their own tickets. Poor sods, I thought. They’re wasting their money. Losers. The result has already been preordained by the verbalization of my positive thoughts. The winning lottery ticket is coming to me.

I then went home and confirmed to my wife that the winning ticket was now in our possession.

I would brook no doubting or poopoohing. No tish-toshing or balderdashing.

This was real. It was happening. It was going down.

Saturday came. The Lottery balls dropped (cough).

I got one measly number.

And a broken finger from scrunching up my lottery ticket so furiously.

Screw you, universe!

But then it hit me.

What the magic ingredient was.

It’s not positive thinking or “verbalizing with intent” that makes white lies come true.

It’s the guilt.

That little stab of guilt and suspicion; that little thought of “oh God, I hope I haven’t just cursed myself; I bet it’ll all come true now”.

It’s the guilt that does it.

So I’ve got me another pound coin for this week. I’m going to buy another lottery ticket. And I’m going to say to everybody I meet that I’m going to win the lottery jackpot and leave all you grovelling poor people behind. I’m going to cast you all off like the dust from my shoe.

But it’s only because I want to feel really guilty.

Honest.

Halloween Boiler

I say “boiler” but actually the Sureway Heating operative I spoke to on the telephone rather tartly informed me that what I actually have is a water heater not a boiler.

Whatever it is the damn things is haunted or possessed or has had a section of its metallic intestines pulled through into an inter-dimensional wormhole because it is just not functioning as it should.

In fact it isn’t even functioning as the laws of physics say it should and, you have to admit, it’s got to have a hefty demon on its shoulders to mess with Professor Brian Cox.

Now, I’m no heating / plumbing engineer, but I know that basically what I have in the bathroom is a big heater thing that heats up the hot water passing through it and then transports it to various outlets around the house via a couple of pipes. We don’t have many outlets. Just two sets in the bathroom and one set downstairs. I live in a 3 bedroomed semi not Longleat House after all.

So. In simple terms:

Heater >> short expanse of pipework >> taps.

An elegant little flowchart. Not much room for error.

And yet things are not right.

We have hot water upstairs. The pilot light is on. The water heater blazes inside like a miniature furnace whenever the hot taps are turned to the full-on position.

But we have no hot water downstairs. None at all. The hot tap is turned on, the heater blazes, water gushes through the pipes but it ain’t (even half) hot (mum). It’s stone cold.

How can this be? How can we have hot water upstairs but not downstairs when all the pipes are fed from the same heater? It’s not like the pipes downstairs are several kilometres longer than the ones upstairs to give the water time to cool down. They don’t divert our water through Siberia or Antarctica on its way to the kitchen tap. Where is our hot water going?

The only change of circumstance that has occurred recently has been the arrival of a new bunch of students next door but they look rather sweet and not the type to siphon of hot water illegally from their neighbours. Borrow a couple of herbal tea bags, yes. Nick hot water, no. And besides. As we all know, students and baths / washing up / clothes washing do not mix. The only thing they know to do with hot water is to shove it into a Pot Noodle. And there isn’t a Pot Noodle hunger big enough to warrant the amount of hot water that has gone missing from my house.

So I’ve rung the experts. The guy I spoke to sounded a little perturbed by the problem and is going to send his best man out this week to take a look at it. OK. OK. He’s going to send a man out to look at it. And then we shall see what we shall see.

In the meantime, I’m breaking out the garlic and the holy water and calling a priest.

Our hot water heater has plainly got bad juju.

Unlucky For Some

It’s the 21st Century. We throw ourselves around the world in great iron birds. We can communicate with someone on the other side of the globe in an instant by bouncing our voices off the myriad satellites that orbit our planet. We’re beginning to unravel the secrets of DNA. Our understanding of the quantum world is beginning to hasten in a new era of human enlightenment.

And yet we’re totally unable to rid ourselves of the most stupid of suspicions.

All week I have watched people grimace and convulse with the kind of facial tics that, a century ago, would have seen them thrown into a Victorian freak show at the merest mention of Friday 13th.

What? You are going to the dentist on Friday 13th? Are you mad? You’ll end up with a root canal and your tongue harpooned on the dentist drill? Or, worse still, stunned with Novocain while Dr Drillgood manhandles your boobs / moobs and etches his name across your pantie-line in teeth whitener!

You’re never flying on the 13th? Internal flight, be damned! You’ll be blown out of the sky by a shoe bomb or worse still find yourself bumped onto a Ryan Air flight with only Gary Glitter for company!

Are you crazy? You’re planning to tightrope walk across the top of the Clifton Suspension Bridge on Friday 13th wearing nothing but a pink peephole bra and bright red galoshes... etc, etc.

You get the picture.

What’s the big deal? It’s just another Goddamned day and just another Goddamned number. It doesn’t mean a damned thing. Why do people get so knicker-twisted over it? It’s like people enjoy the prospect of disaster or bad luck. Behind all the grimacing and gurning that Friday 13th provokes is a definite sunburst of joy that somebody just might fall off a ladder in front of you and spectacularly impale their gonads on a rollerdex... anything to break the tedium of another boring week at the office.

And I suspect that’s what’s behind it. A little something to break the monotony. The possibility that the bone grinding tedium of life might be temporarily broken up by the pig’s bladder of misadventure. As long as it happens to somebody else of course. Audience participation on the 13th is not to be welcomed.

But the 13th has never been unlucky for me. Never. I’ve never had a bad experience with the number 13. Not once. Not ever. I’m immune to it. Totally. And I put this immunity down to the fact that I was actually born on the 13th (of August).

I mean, how can the 13th ever be unlucky for me if it saw my pewling but beautiful form finally arrive in the world, glistening and wriggling and full of all this splendid potential?

Unlucky for the rest of you maybe...

;-)