The boat with the pointy mast

Synopsis:

This is a story about a woman who wins a small fortune.  It tells of how she spent it and what she spent it on, the stereotypes that were broken and the changes she makes to her own life.  It’s written ‘as based on a true story’ though it is in fact fiction. 

CHAPTER ONE

Potential book cover

It was just a normal day in the office, I finished the email I was working on , it had took me 10 minutes to type it because my mind was on cake.  The stupid diet I was on banned me from eating all the good, all be it naughty food my body didn’t need but craved most of the day.

I had ignored the craving for as long as I could so when I sent the email I headed straight for the shops.  I walked around the shop in a kind of a daze, a carrot cake daze.  I could see the other shoppers buzzing around fast and rapid and there I was, in my cake day-dream, dodging through them heading straight for the fresh pasty isle.

With my cake in hand I made my way to the queue, I hate queues.  I know I am British and should like queuing but I can’t stand it.  Getting stuck in between two total strangers with nowhere to look so you pretend to be ultra interested in the goods you have in your basket and trying not to compare it to what other people have in theirs and making stories up about them based on their selection.  Well I am not saying everybody does this but I certainly do.   Take the man in front of me.  He was buying a cheese ploughman sandwich on white bread, a packet of ready salted crisps and a large bottle of pop.  Not very imaginative and high in fat so he’s not concerned over his weight.  He probably is a brilliant lover with a beautiful girlfriend and no one knows quite how he got her.  He ordered a packet of cigarettes and a lottery scratch card with his food.  I woke from my daze for a second, long enough to think “that’s an idea, I must get me one of them.”

I went next and proudly handed over my carrot cake slice, “could I have a scratch card with that please?” I asked

“Any one in particular?” asked the attendant, like this was a choice that I had been thinking about all day.

“No” I answered and remembered thinking what a silly question that is to ask.  I haven’t met anyone who actually knows the game names let alone goes in planning to buy one specific game to play.

I headed out of the shop and eagerly opened the end of the carrot cake slice to take a nibble and whilst I was doing this I used the 2 pence change from the shop attendant and started scratching the scratch card in my hand, head down walking back to work.  I wasn’t even looking where I was going – how’s that for multi-tasking?

I got into the office foyer and was on the last line of my scratch card and three bites into my cake, which was lovely if you were wondering, I had to match two like for like images to win the amount in that row.  So far I had a coin and treasure chest, a bag of money and a coin, a treasure chest and a pirate face and one more row to scratch.

I scratched a small boat shape with a pointy mast, hedging my bets on another coin I scratched the final image and was shocked to see another small boat shape with a pointy mast.

I had won; but I wasn’t expecting to win much. The most I had ever won was £18.00, my usual gain is £1.00 so I was hopeful to make back the £2.00 I’d paid for this card.  I wasn’t even paying that much attention to the amount when I scratched the rest of the card; I was eating the cake after all.

As I thought the first figure was a 2 – it was the remaining figures that made me stop walking and take a second look.  There seemed to be a lot of 0’s after this number, five to be exact.  I had just won £200,000.