Being Careful What You Wish For

I stare at the blank on-line Euro Millions card

presented with the choice of five numbers

between one to fifty and don’t forget the stars.

 

I must make a decision to pick at random

any numbers as they enter my head or choose

birthday dates of loved ones or the houses where

 

they live. Perhaps the number of my neighbour’s

beaten up Peugeot 205 will bring me fortune

and the World opens up to me presenting with

 

possibilities I really cannot imagine and of course

problems. I’ll need a good lawyer preferably a

specialist on corporate law to help manipulate

 

vast sums of money. He will be eye-watering expensive

and then there’s the accountant another mammoth

bill to avoid mammoth tax grabs. How to keep it

 

from the family and my sudden new friends toting

pan-hands. I’ll need to move, but it should be nothing

too ostentatious otherwise ‘they’ might kidnap my kids

 

and I’ll have to surreptitiously inform the police because

they’ll kill them one at a time for every hour I delay paying

and police are useless and I become childless with a bitter

 

wife who has a breakdown and runs off with a gypsy

who blackmails me because it was my fault she hanged

herself in the bedroom of his caravan in Andalusia.

 

The pressure begins to get to me and I empty the bottle

of Highland Park I bought for guests who never came

because they were never invited and thought I thought

 

I was too good for them now I’m a rich stuck-up prick

and get in my GT Mustang and drive to the nearest Tesco

to get another bottle, but instead take out an Afro-Caribbean

 

women pushing a fully loaded twin pushchair and skid

on their spilled blood and bury the nose of the Mustang on

the trunk of a protected thousand-year old specimen

 

English Oak killing it and myself from multiple head and

Internal injuries making National news and vicious headlines.

For the next week I’m eviscerated by the Sun, Mirror and Mail.

 

The phones of members of my family are hacked and crucified

I become the focal point of Times op-eds and late-night

BBC2 half-arsed pseudo-intellectual talk-crap programmes.

 

I take a deep breath and click the quickpick icon and

hope I win enough for the new i-Pad my youngest needs

for school perhaps the designer Nikes Emma saw on Amazon.