I stood in a queue at the express checkout of our local supermarket yesterday for over fifteen minutes trying to stay calm, whilst my fingers froze on a packet of mixed veg. A ragged couple in their seventies were responsible for the queue stalling, and why? They were buying nothing of nutritional or medicinal value, but were painstakingly cashing in what appeared to be a lifetime’s worth of lottery tickets. In total they must have pulled out over twenty screwed up tickets, each yielding precisely zilch. They looked disappointed, almost shocked and I felt that this deluded couple really did expect to win millions. The man appeared to age in seconds as if just having been diagnosed with terminal cancer and was somehow trying to apologise to his wife. The man then ripped open his wallet and looked up at the plastic scratch card dispenser baffled at the choice. His grubby finger hovered over the display as he selected several cards before parting with £20. He grabbed the cards like a junkie and disappeared from the queue like a frenzied fox that had just snared a rabbit. By the time I reached the counter my frozen mixed veg had begun to thaw. It then occurred to me that newsagents, supermarkets and petrol stations had turned into mini casinos, satisfying the addictions of desperate, financially unstable people. Camelot play their role in ensuring that the poor remain poor and the rich become ricer by enforcing an unfair tax collection system. We are misled into believing we play lotto games for their entertainment value, but that’s horse shit, we play because we are addicted, we have become desperate.
The old man’s haunted face stayed with me for the rest of the day, I felt I needed to apportion blame and I naturally thought of Camelot. Their national lottery business is doing roaring trade in today’s depressed climate, in face they appear to be doing a magnificent job as the government’s unofficial tax collector. Camelot uses state of the art marketing techniques to sell the idea of becoming rich beyond our wildest dreams using plenty of bright colours and flashy smiles on the TV, Internet and advertising boards, and it works because we have all fallen into their flytrap.
I’ve only just checked out Camelot’s national lottery website, it’s a gambling addict’s paradise. There’s such a selection of games to chose from, treasure & TV show games, board & dice games, arcade & word games, and they all promise you the chance of winning £100,000, and all with a £2 stake, and it got me thinking about the odds. I checked them out and they are frighteningly biased towards Camelot. The bigger lotto wins offer even more horrendous odds, but we step willingly into their flytrap.
Only a small percentage of Camelot takings go towards funding projects, but this is only tokenism on a large scale, the large percentage of takings go towards topping up government coffers to fund global policies and lining the pockets of all the senior administrators involved. It’s also alarming how this aspect of gambling has become normalised, expected, demanded. Placing a bet on a horse is still frowned upon as being the action of a despicable gambler who is probably an alcoholic and a wife beater. Sadly as a mass we are financially unprincipled and can’t resist the chance, regardless of whether the odds are stacked heavily against us, to win cash, I know that my will power has withered over the years.
I am even more convinced now that there are no lotto millions winners, the winning is a fabrication of the truth, a scam, a cover up, a conspiracy. I’ve never met anyone who’s won the jackpot neither do I know anyone who has every met anyone who has won millions either. It’s always the case of an apologetic ‘oh they are out there because I know someone who knows of a big winner’, which is hardly proof. Newspaper reports can also be discarded as evidence as well, because they can be easily fabricated. If Ridley Scott can digitally recreate the Colosseum in Rome then I’m sure Camelot could access the technical resources to create lotto millionnaires. The next time you stare at an image of a lotto millionaire, remember they are not real, they have been digitally created, they did it with Oliver Reed in Gladiator!
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