I don't play the National Lottery - but that doesn't stop me thinking about what I would do with £66m

How satisfying would it be to ease that pressure for a few people you are genuinely fond of?

When you're that loaded, it must be easy to forget how stressful and exhausting life tends to be if you are ordinarily impoverished (Ping Zhu)

Like many people, I believe I would probably have won the National Lottery by now if I hadn't once been good at maths. If you grasp the probabilities, you know that you are more likely to be struck by lightning in a given week than win the lottery, even if you never leave the house. So you never buy a ticket. You understand that the lottery is a tax on stupidity. But this understanding is itself a tax on intelligence. For you will never win, under any circumstances, if you do not take part.

The other week, when there was £66m up for grabs, I couldn't find it within myself to walk a hundred yards up the road and buy the single ticket that could, conceivably, have changed everything. Even so, my inertia couldn't stop me thinking about what I would do with £66m, or as it turned out, £33m, as two tickets shared the bounty. It's a wonderful mental game to play, and I seem to have been playing it in most of my waking hours since.

First job, of course, would be to pay off your debts, your family's debts, your friends' debts. It might take millions, but it would be worth it. I have a handful of friends who have amassed large piles of money over the past 30 years. At least one of them has been unfailingly kind and generous to me. At least one other has vanished from all our lives and now hangs out only with other plutocrats.

When you're that loaded, it must be easy to forget how stressful and exhausting life tends to be if you are ordinarily impoverished. My income stream has been known to slow to a trickle. You lie in bed at night adding up figures that don't add up. How satisfying would it be to ease that pressure for a few people you are genuinely fond of?

I would also buy a house (having only ever lived in flats) and a new car, but then what? I can fantasise that I would take this holiday or buy those paintings, but I suspect it's more fun to fantasise than actually make the purchases. The rich are different from us, but only because they have discovered the great unspoken truth behind all this: that money is truly fascinating only when you don't have any. My writer friends talk about nothing else. My rich friends never mention money. It's boring and it's embarrassing. And I don't mention it to them because I don't want to bore and embarrass them. It's a contract you realise you have to make if the friendship is to endure.

Besides, the only thing more wearying than a poor person moaning about lack of funds is a rich person boasting about the opposite. A couple of years ago I went to a college reunion, and sat with a motley collection of men who had been in the same year as me.

There were maybe a dozen of us, and we divided neatly into two groups: the ones who had lived normal, modest, bourgeois lives (writers, teachers, doctors, small-town solicitors) and those who had become obscenely rich in IT or the City and retired young to count their money. They had come to the reunion mainly to show off. With one exception, who was rather a card, they were very dull men indeed.

The paups, meanwhile, were delightful, even one or two I hadn't much liked when I was 19. We all agreed rather drunkenly that we would rather be poor and happy, as though we had ever had a choice.