How to spend it

Much musing over what I would have done if, as I expected to, I won the stupendous, idiotic, avarice-inducing, rolled-over-12-times Euro Millions Lottery last evening. This game seems to be a sort of Eurovision Song Contest for greedy bastards. To scoop the big prize - it was £120 million this week but is usually just a few million (A FEW MILLION, DID YOU SAY?, OH, HARDLY WORTH BUYING A TICKET, THEN) - you need to match seven numbers and, in order not to share it, hope that no other poor, deluded sap has matched them too.

Someone far more sensible and nice than me suggested that, if I won, I should give 100 away. I thought she meant £100, but no, she meant £100,000,000. "You could open your own wing at the National Gallery." That, of course, would be an ideal way to gain admittance to the circle of the great and good. Maybe I could use it instead to buy myself a double first in astrophysics from Cambridge, tossing Stephen Hawking out of his chair - the Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics I mean, not his buggy - as the dons, fellows and College heads simpered approval in their velvet gowns and floppy hats. That's it! I'd found a new College - Bugger Hall! Think of the kudos, think of the brown-nosing and fawning - think of the tax breaks.

Slightly more appealing, given that I detest brown-nosing and fawning, would be to build, or cause to have built, Le Corbusier-style pavilions in the countryside to sell to the upwardly mobile. This, however, might be doomed, too, since I would fit the places out the way I wanted, not the way they wanted. The customer is seldom right, in my experience.

Royston, work colleague, vouchsafed that if he won, he would lead a conga around the office then climb up onto the ledge in front of the executive suites and bare his bottom. Nice, but just too theatrical. No, the best thing would be to pack in work, sit at home quietly for a few months, and calm down.

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I was so crestfallen at not winning (again), that I thought I would snub the National Lottery and not bother to buy a ticket at all today. These people need showing who's boss.