I Won! I Won! Now Where's The Fucking Bar?!

Keith Gough (58), a man with a name almost impossible to say correctly five times at pace, died of a heart attack last week. Five years ago Mr. Gough won £9million (HK$106m) on the UK National Lottery and happily toasted his new life in the national press with champagne and ceremony. However, that was where Mr. Gough’s troubles began.

Confronted with his massive windfall, Mr. Gough developed a fondness for purchasing racehorses, sportscars and also purchased a directors box at Villa Park – home of his beloved Aston Villa. Unfortunately, Mr. Gough also developed a greater fondness for the drink and his wife left him shortly after his lottery windfall.

Mr. Gough – by all accounts – descended into a life of depression and disillusionment which culminated in a tendency to actively discourage people entering the newsagents from purchasing a lottery ticket. As noble as Mr. Gough’s intentions were and as poignant as his story is, people like me still fancy winning the lottery as the solutions to all of life’s little problems. So how does one survive the life of a lottery winner?

City analysts suggest that the average lottery winner, because they remain just normal people after all, should devote at least a third of their newfound fortune to philanthropic whims. Perhaps give that old arsehole Mr. Selby down the road there the £2000 he needs to murder his wife in Switzerland? Or give those Henderson boys that last chance trip to Disneyland if you can’t find the cheaper option of black market kidneys on eBay?

Further advice from those crazy analysts is to live day to day using the interest garnered from your remaining fortune. I don’t know about you but that seems a little boring to me. It’s like being given God-like guitar skills and restricting their use to playing Sunday afternoon park jazz for geriatric dinosaurs who only get excited when someone passes by who looks like they might know where to get a cheap flight to Switzerland.

The final, and probably the most logical advice from our analytical friends of trends, is to invest vast swathes of your fortune in real estate and profitable stocks and bonds. That way, you can really consolidate your living fund and allow yourself the odd whimsical business enterprise. And my business enterprise of choice will be; A Very Silly Company Indeed (AVSCI™).

The business idea itself is one long mooted by my dear friend Colin (Cola-Bottle) Robison. After a failed business trip to Switzerland, he came back renewed and determined never to return to that murderous mound ever again. No, Cola Bottle had a plan that would turn his life around.

Cola Bottle lamented the constant human insistence upon finding purpose in life and still hates the need to establish meaning in every situation we face as human beings. Therefore, we decided to set up an operation with no definable purpose and a completely illogical existence; AVSCI™.

From the outset, we agreed that no matter how big we got as a group, we’d never deal with the Swiss. Truth be told, the first 17 hours of minuted dialogue regarding AVSCI™ pretty much amounted to promising one another we’d never deal with those bureaucratic bemused-biddy butchers. Even in business, a man has to have his principles.

Staffing was the next major concern. We deduced that, in order to achieve our aims, we needed around seven managerial staff to every regular employee. To fully embellish the curse of confusion, roles were also to be awarded ambiguous titles themed around failed BBC docusoap El Dorado as opposed to obvious titles like Regional Director.

In terms of day to day running, we opted for a very relaxed approach to our workload. In fact, we opted for the most relaxed approach possible by removing all deadlines and expectations from our mainline employees. In order to help our employees feel challenged, we decided to implement a musical mode of communication where one’s opinions could only be legitimate if sung in rhyme and in the chosen key of the day.

Of course, we acknowledged that modernity man needs to feel some degree of worth in his product. Therefore, we decided to smear the words ‘well done’ and ‘good job’ in our own faeces across the toilet walls of AVSCI™; clearly a company with a sense of humour.

In order to satisfy the criteria for achieving charitable status, we were required to find roles for seven and a quarter apprentices. We decided to form a bat and ball division and have it spearheaded and run entirely by these young protégés. If they bounced the ball on the bat six hundred times we’d say ‘well done and ‘good job’ and then their challenge would be to beat their previous record. We decided to have a smaller bat custom made for the quarter person in the event that they have functional hands and arms.

Every good company excels in research and development of their product and, since we had no discernable product, we decided that our research and development department would be responsible for finding ways of making the company ever more pointless and insignificant. This department was to be staffed in the future years by our brightest and best ball bouncers.

So if I do win the lottery, a very silly branch of AVSCI™ may open up near you. So be happy in your life for now and hold off on that trip to Geneva those Toblerone toting tyrants keep encouraging you to make. You could be the next Futures and Actuaries Geraldo of our great and promising organisation and be told things like 'well done' and 'good job'; or you can spend your whole life wanking away your days until those mountain loving morbidites come calling…