Of course, I'd immediately give almost all of it to charity, to assuage any guilty feelings that I might have about finding that amount of cash in a holdall by the side of the road or on the body of a tramp that I tripped over down by the canal. (I did nearly trip over the body of a tramp on a recent run in Manchester: with one good kick, he would have been in the canal. However, on my return jog I discovered that he wasn't dead after all, just sleeping off a hangover!) Perhaps I'd donate to an excellent charity like Rianna's Fund, which helps orphanages in Kenya, Uganda and India. Or maybe I should donate it to a charity that helps tramps.
I would need to dole out some cash to members of my close family in order to keep them quiet. The fact is though, that you would probably be better off keeping the news of your new-found millions to yourself, to avoid any unnecessary family unpleasantness. It would be so much simpler. I can understand why lottery winners often elect to remain anonymous. I recall hearing about the workers in a hairdressing salon who won UK£20m between them. They had wild parties, bought new cars and houses, went on fabulous cruises and exotic holidays and spent a lot. Once the euphoria was over, they drifted back to the hairdressing salon and went back to work - and found that they were just as happy (or as grumpy) as they had been before.
I would buy myself a new car – probably a low-mileage decade-old V70 Volvo estate car: something reliable and not too flash, a car that I could happily take rubbish to the dump in, or drive over to my yacht. Yes, a yacht – I'm afraid I would probably have to invest in a 36-foot six berth sailboat, possibly a Sigma or something similar. I would probably moor it at Lymington, a pleasant town on the Solent in the south of England, just opposite the Isle of Wight. It would be my one weakness.
That would still leave me with a lot of money. It would be no good to dig a hole and keep it there, since inflation and worms would eat into it (literally, in the case of the worms). No, I would be obliged to put my money to work, but doing what?
Well, one of the fanciful possibilities that came up over a beer at this conference was the possibility of investing in a landfill site. No, not an empty landfill, but a full one. Properly selected, an old landfill site would give you a steady supply of methane with which to generate electricity, a project in itself that would probably qualify for Clean Development Mechanism credits (and which would burnish one's 'green' reputation). Alternatively, you could certainly power or partly power a gypsum plant (depending on its size) with methane from a decent-sized landfill (it's been done for energy-intensive lime kilns, after all). Then, once the methanogenesis had started to decrease, I would purge the landfill to stop methane production and start to dig it up. Here my desk-based research would come into its own: I would have selected a landfill from the 1970s (remember them, when a million pounds was really worth something?), when all sorts of valuable stuff would end up in landfills: metals, paper, plastic (oh, and maybe some asbestos and a few bodies, from the rumours I hear: not so good). I'd separate it all using some trommels and screens and sell all the recyclable plastic and the metals. The inerts I would probably use for building materials, while the lightest fraction would be used for fuel. Whether to use it as fuel for an on-site electricity generation facility that formerly used methane from the landfill or to sell it to either an energy-from-waste plant or to a cement or lime plant would depend entirely on who is willing to pay the most. I suspect that it will be the electricity producer.
I'd probably buy a few shares and I think that the international building materials companies are a pretty good bet (they would have been an even better investment if you had managed to put your money into them in March 2008 - ah, hindsight!).
The fact is though that it's been found that - like the hairdressers - your happiness level increases immediately after a big win, but soon drops back down to the level from before your win. Maybe I should save my money and not buy a lottery ticket after all. Somebody's going to get rich, but it's not likely to be me!
