Cold Feet and Random Balls

I learnt something new very early today - five past midnight to be exact. It came courtesy of everyone's favourite Teletext time-killer, Bamboozle. For me, Bamboozle brings to mind two things - the day we got Fasttext on our telly and could actually play Bamboozle, which made me feel like my family had suddenly hit the big time; and playing Kids' Bamboozle on a Saturday morning at the age of 17, and realising that my efforts to avoid A-Level revision had reached an all-time desperate low. On this occasion I was trying to extend a drab weekday evening by an extra five minutes, but I learnt something useful. Which is this:

England's first lottery took place in the 16th century.

The lottery, which we can safely assume was not preceded by a drawn out and unnecessary 'Ye Thunderball'-style draw, was put together by the medieval Eamonn Holmes, Queen Elizabeth I, to raise money for England's ailing harbours. Now I've been to Southampton and Portsmouth recently and can only assume that the money went on outlet stores and big ASDAs, rather than any proper regeneration work. Prizes in the Tudor tombola were money and tapestry. Pity the poor bastard who saved up all his groats for a ticket and 'won' a woven portrayal of the battle of Agincourt.

Lotteries have been crushing dreams for a couple of millennia, and are apparently even mentioned in the Bible, which probably reads something like "fall not into the temptation of wasteful gambling, except for this Sabbath, when it's a TRIPLE ROLLOVER!" I don't do the lottery much: I can still remember the predictable yet crushing disappointment when my dad's 'dead cert' ticket failed to deliver on the National Lottery's opening night. I think the atrocious ads have also played their part - the sight of her off Cold Feet talking to a camp Irish unicorn actually made me want to give money away in protest. I did go in for a recent Euro Millions uber-rollover, but having purchased my ticket I looked back at the queue and realised my chances were slim enough of having the best ticket out of the people in the shop at that moment. How could I take on the population of France? As the existence of this blog attests, I fell woefully short.