Friday 8 June 2007

Bittersweet Orchestral Rendition

(side-stepping copyright infringement laws and obviating a court-case from the erstwhile Verve's lawyers)
But I believe you get the idea - there is a certain ambivalence to my mood, since I have finished my final exams :D...but...what would otherwise be ecstatic joy is tempered somewhat by a certain empty, lacklustre feeling, stemming from the loss of that former impetus, for studious achievement. There is also a certain element of anxiety over the actual outcome. Nevertheless, I am free, and this is by any measure a joyous occasion, meretorious of champagne and wotnot.

On a less serious note, any delight I may feel at this is outshone by the literal disbelief at having won the lottery; one million euros, to be precise. I was informed of this while still in the middle of my exam preparations, and as you can imagine, I was rather pleased. As any optimistically- inclined fellow would do, I naturally accepted it with the utmost credulity - it's no stretch of the imagination to believe that I could win a competition that I never entered; people are so fortunate all the time, right?

And of course, it should come as no surprise that the lottery has branched out from the archaic method of charging people money for tickets, into the much more philanthropic and modern approach of randomly selecting winners from all the email addresses out there in internet-land. It seems a niche market that's been under-exploited of late, and one that I most heartily applaud them for embracing. A more sceptical individual may have questioned the fact that the email, informing me of my good fortune, originated from an AOL mailbox, and that the word Euromillions lacked certain vowels that are traditionally associated with its spelling. No doubt this is a carefully-chosen approach, designed to appeal to the 'YouTube' generation, for whom the English language is infinitely malleable. Sheer genius, on behalf of the Euromillions Marketing Department.

Unconscionable as it would be for me to question the authenticity of such serendipitous munifience, I still thought it prudent to approach this with caution, for two reasons:

Firstly, I was spending my days cloistered in the library, rapt in a delirium of academic fervor, and apprehensive of the coming exams. I could not, therefore, pick up the enormous cheque, myself (the transporting of which would no doubt require a forklift truck).

Secondly, lottery millionaires are often harassed by plaintive letters, remonstrating that the winner's fortune should be shared with those not so blessed, so as to ameloriorate their present financial predicament.

With these points foremost in my mind, I responded hastily to the epistle, but not without taking the prudent measure of utilising a pseudonym:



To:euromllns@aol.co.uk
RE: Official Notification: Your email address has won One Million Euros in the EuroMillions Lottery

oh, delightful! how serendipitous. unfortunately, i'm a little too busy at present to collect it. please deposit the winnings in 5-and 10-euro denominations, in a brown paper envelope, in your nearest rubbish receptacle, and my agents will be around shortly to collect them.
many thanks for your charitable and nonsensical generosity
yours,
-The Right Honorable Charles Montgomery (Esquire), Fourteenth Earl of Rockall

2 comments:

aria said...

Congratulations! For two things - your exams are over .. I never liked exams .. and also for winning that lottery .. hehe .
what a delightful read .. though I'm a tad disappointed coz when I read the first sentence I was thinking of ways to make you spend some on me but by the end of it .. *sigh* :(

Equivocationalist said...

i'm not a big fan of exams either, strangely enough. there's something about them that never quite appealed to me. i think we're probably unique in that respect. yup yup.

now, i think it's a bit premature to judge that i haven't, in fact, won the lottery. without conducting an exhaustive survey of all the landfill sites in the locality, i think it's non sequitur to conclude that my would-be-fortune isn't residing at one of them.