I have genuinely had a long-term obsession with the idea that if I won big on the EuroMillions I would be aggressively casual about it. For no reason other than not telling people I have won the lottery just strikes me as quite cool. I’ve never really seen myself as one of those “presented with a giant cheque” guys.
We’d be talking about a vibe shift, first and foremost. I would suddenly insist on eating out or ordering in for every meal; I would propose a trip to the pub and be the first person to offer to buy a round, my antipathy towards £7 pints having mysteriously evaporated. If I won the Tuesday-night EuroMillions, I’d still go to work on the Wednesday, but I would arouse my colleagues’ suspicions by not bringing a packed lunch in for the first time in a decade.
After 24 hours of being very cool about it I’d probably need to include my family as obviously there are limits to how much you can enjoy extravagant wealth if you don’t let on to your own wife and children. I’d do this not through normal, honest open communication but by starting to ramp up the levels of spending in a way that made it obvious I had come into money. As a starter, I’d cheerily suggest we go on the ridiculously impractical holiday to the Super Nintendo theme park in Japan my kids have been bugging me about. Or acquire a very expensive hat of some sort. Whatever. I’d just keep doing it until confronted, at which point I would just casually say: “Oh, I didn’t say? Yeah, I won the EuroMillions.”
Would my wife be exasperated with me on discovering we had been multimillionaires for 24 hours but I didn’t say anything? Probably a bit. Would she get over it because we were now multimillionaires? Yes.
In fact, it would be a relief to share the wealth because I guess we now start hitting what I’m going to call rich guy admin. It would be absurd to keep living in a three-bed flat in Beckenham while also being a multimillionaire, but at the same time I don’t personally find moving house very interesting. So I would graciously outsource that and stuff like new furniture or whatever to my other half, who would be much better at it than me. I would continue to keep it real – and while I might end up moving to the fancy bit of Beckenham, it probably wouldn’t happen in week one.
I would have to tell the rest of my close family I was now rich just because if I didn’t do it now, I might not get around to it until Christmas. My parents are boomers and therefore want for nothing, but obviously if there’s any little trinkets they do require – a new car, or a third foreign holiday that year – then I will make that happen. I will also buy my brother a flat.
As mentioned above, I would hold on to my job: I like my job, and quite frankly loads of journalists come from family wealth, so I’m not going to throw it away only for some minor baronet to sneak in and replace me. However, in the short term, I’d like to take a bit of time off. There ought to be some kind of positive compassionate leave for people who’ve just won EuroMillions.
I would naturally like to take an immediate holiday, either on my own or with a friend, which I feel is acceptable because I just won the family £120m (Japan can wait until the school holidays). It’s been a long-held dream to visit all 44 countries in Europe, which I will do by train because private jets are vulgar and bad for the environment – and also I will still be a regular guy (who travels first class by train). Admittedly, I’m unlikely to squeeze 44 countries into a single trip – certainly not in what’s left of my first week – but me and my best friend have always joked that we’d like to do a holiday that solely took in European micro-countries, so why not do that: Liechtenstein, San Marino, Andorra and end in Monaco, a place where I could maybe make some new super-rich pals.
I feel like while this might have put a dent into my millions, we’re probably some ways from it being a serious one, so maybe time to get into quixotic big money stuff, which I could arrange from the train on my travels.
Here’s the pitch: I have long been convinced my hometown of Birmingham is underappreciated thanks to a chronic lack of actual stuff for tourists to do. Basically, it’s got a chocolate factory and a shopping centre. But I think maybe I could be the one to fix this if only I was given the means to do so by the universe. Without a £100m+ DGAF-style level of EuroMillions win then possibly I’m not going to build a major international tourist attraction single-handedly. But I hope it could be a first step. What would I do? I mean I have lots of thoughts but, if we’re going full on quixotic, I would love to get the ball rolling on some sort of JRR Tolkien-based attraction that doesn’t suck. Did you know Tolkien was a Brummie and The Lord of the Rings was supposedly inspired by Birmingham? Probably not when the only thing in the entire city capitalising on this is a small visitor centre in a suburban bog that nobody knows about.
Maybe this would be a huge success that would pay my investment back, maybe a total failure. But if you can’t take a chance on a stupid idea you’re passionate about when the universe has just handed you more money than you would otherwise have seen in your entire lifetime, then when can you?
