Live like a millionaire

On Monday I met up with my parents for lunch, and a friend of theirs came along as well. He is the father of my oldest friend and is this kind of scary looking West Indian chap who has an opinion on anything and everything and, apparently, is always right. But he is actually absolutely lovely and once you get used to him, you realise you can be really cheeky and can argue back at some of his more outrageous statements.

He always has a special place in my heart, as many years ago he helped me learn how to tell the time. This involved a cheese triangle box lid being turned into a clock face. It changed my life I can tell you and has aided me in catching trains, turning up for work on time and, more importantly, working out the exact moment when I can escape work and go home.

I suppose nowadays with the advent of digital watches and so on, being able to read a normal analogue watch may become a dying art. It’s like children not knowing what a rotary phone is because now all phones have buttons that you press and the number often comes up on a screen. A friend said to me a while ago that those toy phones that a lot of children had when I was a child just confuse children now because you just don’t get phones like that any more.

My parents’ friend is also quite a big fan of the lottery and buys a ticket for the draw on both Saturday and Wednesday. But he never checks the result the day of the draw, instead he waits until the day before the next draw. So, on a Friday night he checks the result from Wednesday and so on. I once asked him why he does that and he said that it’s because in those days between the draw and when he checks to see if he’s won he might be a millionaire. So for those couple of days he can assume he’s a millionaire and live his life in that belief– and if he checks and discovers that he isn’t, then he only has one day of disappointment before the next draw, and once again he might be a millionaire. Sounds fair enough to me.