Weekend of love... we did naff all.

Oh yeah we went to McDonalds and stuffed our faces, adding more Monopoly tiles to our game cards. We are such suckers for those promotions. Well, there's £100,000 up for grabs if we can get Mayfair. Mind you there has to be only two of those tiles in existance, logic dictates. And also logical is that the best time to win one is when the promotion starts. If they put the winning tiles in halfway through there's a chance they might be accused of trying the fiddle the draw to leave them unclaimed. So the odds are good we are wasting our time. But we still hold out hope, despite evidence to the contrary that we might still win. That's the gamblers disease.

I stopped myself suffering from that ailment long ago. The penny push machine at the fair cured me of it. "It's so close, I can win all those pennys, and probably that watch, if I can just put enough pennys in" I said. I ran all the way home. Begged my mum to give me more pennies so I could overload the machine and pay her back a hundred times over. She smiled enigmatically as she forked it over. Did she know I was running for a fall?

I ran back down to Gadebridge Park to the fair... the machine was still loaded and I painstakingly slotted my coins in, one at a time, timing my shots and waiting for the perfect moment to win allthat moolah. My heart was in my throat and I had a gamblers fever. If only, if only... My last coin fell and nothing happened. Nothing. Not one coin dropped. I was too young to know the addage that "the house" always wins. I was devastated. But I learned a valuable lesson. There really is no such thing as a free lunch.

Oh except I won a free cheeseburger instead of the £100,000.