How to win R10 million

1. Invite me to your party
2. Ply me with red wine
3. Provide a fireplace (preferably unlit) for me to sit
4. Ask me for the winning numbers

I went to a party on Friday night. As is fairly usual in these situations, I had a fair bit of red wine (Lindhorst Merlot, 2003 for those who may wish to accurately recreate the experiment). At some point in the evening, having spent much of it seated in a fireplace, adding to my already greying hair with the ash of the fireplace chimney everyime I moved too vigorously, I was saying goodbye to Brian, a local estate agent. I can’t quite remember how we got onto the topic (and that’s probably the most interesting part of the story), but I ended up giving him 3 numbers to choose for the next day’s lotto. Now I haven’t played the Lotto since shortly after launch, when it was still a novelty, figuring I’ve got better things to do with my R2 than making the lotto company rich. Much like my first experience with gambling (losing R50 playing the one-arm bandits with R1 coins at a Ciskei casino around 1990, in exactly 50 pulls of the lever), I didn’t win, and that probably helped prevent any possible visits to Gambler’s Anonymous.

The numbers I divined in the depths of my wine-sodden trance were 16, 23 and 41.

This morning I got a phone call from Brian. All three numbers had come up. Unfortunately the other three he chose didn’t, and he’d only won R27 or so. Now the odds of getting three out of three when there are 40-odd (is it 49?) numbers to choose from are ridiculously low. Brian understandably wanted 6 numbers for this week, and was berating himself for not asking for 6 numbers at the time.

So what happened? Was it pure luck? Did a sudden breakthough in my tai chi and meditation practice make me at one with the universe? Did the red wine slow down my overactive left brain to allow my right and left brains to fuse in a maelstrom of activity, breaking through our 3-dimensional prison reality and move freely in the 4th-dimension of time, just for an instant?

Perhaps more interestingly to some, will it happen again?

Hell, who knows, but if you can provide a fireplace and some wine, I’m willing to try. Once my fame spreads I’ll start charging attendance fees – now that’s where the real money lies!