Opinion: Dreaming of the not-so-big one

Wyn Drabble.

Sometimes the lottery creates winners of amounts that are impossible to comprehend. I can just stretch to imagining the $7 million won by a Timaru family but the $70 million won by an Australian couple starts to tax the imagination. Can you even buy a wallet that big?

Which means that you'd need a bigger imagination than I have and an entire bank vault for the $1.5 billion just won in a US jackpot. I suppose a million here and a million there soon add up. Remember the old adage: look after the millions and the billions will take care of themselves.

Imagining that much is just too tough: to me, it's as useful as saying that a particular heavenly body is 23 trillion light years away. "Is that further than Kaitaia?" I might ask.

The maths wouldn't be easy, either. If you're someone who studied accountancy at school and can't shake the habit of keeping detailed records, you would need to subtract the cost of your $2.95 toothbrush from $1,500,000,000.00, remembering to carry the ones and show all your working in the margin. That's no easy task. It was hard enough for me just working out how many zeros to write.

I'm so thick I often can't follow the instructions on some of the more difficult Lotto scratchies: "Scratch each row until a symbol matches the logo on your clothing then multiply it by seven, add up all the even numbers revealed and solve the complex quadratic equation on the reverse of this ticket."

The kind of winning I can more easily relate to is a chook raffle. A plump chook is enough of a prize to give you that winning feeling but it still leaves you with decisions to make - should you stuff it, for instance? Or put it in the freezer for later?

This level of winning started when I was 7. I found a halfpenny coin in the gutter and took it to the corner shop to spend. I asked for a ha'penny's worth of aniseed balls even though I knew they were five a penny. I won: the man gave me three!

I guess my winning has remained pretty much at that level ever since. $1.5 billion is on another planet! So, what would I do with big winnings? I'm afraid the US amount is too big to comprehend (I don't need a private jet, a bottle of vintage Penfolds Grange Hermitage or a year's supply of diamond-encrusted biros) so I'll just dream on the more manageable $7 million.

There are five in the family so they would get a million each to do with what they wish and the other two million would go into a bank while some serious thinking went on. Simple.

But historical examples bear out another old adage: a fool and his money are soon parted.

Many winners of huge amounts have not found the happiness they thought would come their way.

Alex and Rhoda Toth, destitute at the time, won $13 million in a Florida Lotto jackpot and lived a lavish life for a short time until they were charged with filing fraudulent tax returns.

Alex suffered a heart attack and died before the trial and Rhoda served two years in prison and had to pay the tax department $1.1 million in restitution.

If you gathered together all the world's lottery winners and stood them shoulder to shoulder, I think I could safely say that you had far too much time on your hands and possibly need to get out more.

Voltaire described lotteries as a tax on stupidity. One wit, Daniel Tammet, added, "More specifically, I think, on innumeracy."

- Wyn Drabble is a teacher of English, a writer, musician and public speaker.