Between blotch and blok

When the National Lottery first started we swore never to buy a ticket. [Nasty regressive piece of taxation hitting the poorest hardest, raising unrealistic expectations, wasting resources running the scam that could otherwise be directly given to the good causes that were meant to benefit, dreadful lottery draw TV shows...]. Or at least we wouldn't buy a ticket until we had collected the necessary cash from the pavement. A large number of years later and we've reached a milestone of sorts: we're as close to two-thirds of the way to our target as we can be without shaving off approximately one-third from one of the pennies, or one-sixth from one of the tuppences....

Finding a 50p along the way helped.

Discovering three pennies forming the vertices of a triangle in the middle of the pavement late one night was a tad strange.

In one of those, neatly-organised, parallel universes where the structures of reality mirror the patterns of storybooks, we will eventually find enough coins to buy our £1 ticket [in this dimension the price will double the day we reach our target], which will inevitably win. No, forget that, we don't win, but then as we're walking disconsolately along the road the week after we fail to even make a tenner from the draw, we'll find a fiver, use it to buy five tickets [or several rows on one ticket--see we really haven't done this before, we don't know how it works] and win with the last set of numbers, a rollover jackpot shared with only a small number of people. Our co-winners will rapidly succumb to grisly, but appropriate, fates, probably whilst touring a mysterious chocolate factory, leaving us as the eventual sole beneficiary--

Oops! Dozed off for a moment, then. Was having such a good dream.