Many more lottery prizes of a modest million or two might make for a happier nation, says Jenny McCartney. Lower the sum: A smaller prize money might lead to more lottery winners and more happiness in general By Jenny McCartney

7:00PM BST 23 Oct 2010

Last week, as numerous whey-faced citizens were shivering and wincing under serial cuts from George Osborne's niftily wielded axe, the news was drifting in that someone in the UK had just won £113 million in the Euromillions lottery. For a moment, with the sound of stern, belt-tightening slogans still ringing in its ears, a nation closed its eyes and fantasised.

The sum of £113 million, you see – even if shared among a small syndicate – isn't the kind of usefully sensible amount that could pay for a kitchen extension or a nice car: it's a proper, gigantic explosion of silly money, catapulting its gob-smacked winner or winners into the rarefied world of the international super-rich. Overnight, it renders any single winner richer than Rod Stewart (estimated worth: £105 million), and without having to spend a lifetime gamely belting out Hot Legs. It's such an enormous sum that – even if you don't encourage it – it just squats there and gets bigger, helplessly inflating itself by £9,000 in interest a day.

And so, as the dull voices bleating about rising pension ages and child benefit cuts receded, everyone promptly started playing the what-would-you-do-if-you-won-£113-million game. It's a splendid game, and I like listening to other people play it even more than playing it myself, because there's something almost poetic about the way in which it compels people to reveal their secret, unrealisable enthusiasms.

"Would you really buy a farmhouse in Dorset with stables for horses, and a townhouse in Belgravia?" I hear myself saying, pompously appreciative: "How interesting. Yes, I do think you're quite right to keep somewhere in London as well. But I'm going for an apartment in Paris, very near the Jardin du Luxembourg." And then I get back to wondering whether, by the time my children make it to university age, one might indeed require a jackpot win just to pay the fees.

The game itself is nothing new, and nor is the fact that it becomes more enjoyable when played with spiralling sums of fictional money. In 1941, Dorothy Parker published a short story called "The Standard of Living", in which two modestly-paid stenographers, Annabel and Midge, happily while away their time in heated debate about what they would do if they were left a million dollars in a will. One day, they see a glorious pearl necklace in a shop window and, upon polite inquiry, find out that it costs $250,000. This discovery triggers an attack of the glums, since it constitutes too large a proportion of their selected sum, and squashes the easy grandeur of the fantasy. Soon after, mutual spirits are restored with the question: so what would you do if someone left you ten million dollars?

As news of whopping lottery jackpots becomes more common, the same thing is happening here. Even people who are mortgaged up to the eyeballs, in credit card debt, and secretly worried that they're just about to get the sack, somehow feel that a £1 million lottery win is too insubstantial to dream about. They would be thoroughly delighted to bag it, of course, but in their fantasies it is closer to £100 million. In an era of national austerity, those who play the Lottery want their dream ticket to take them as far away as possible from Cameron and Osborne's clammy little phrase "we're all in it together" to a dizzying financial peak in which they are no longer in it at all.

Although I am aware that what I am about to say runs the risk of spoiling all the fun of the silly-money game, I believe that the lottery organisers should devise a way to cap the prize at, say, £2 or £3 million, while enlarging the pool of winners. The truly bloated prize, as it has emerged in the past, often has a dangerously distorting effect upon the winner's life: work becomes utterly devalued and meaningless, and family relationships skewed.

How much cheerier it would be if, rather than creating a few dazed loons staggering under an unfeasible weight of cash, substantially more people received enough to relieve them permanently from money worries. It would make for a saner, happier country, but I'm not sure it would catch on. After all, people don't buy a ticket to win: they buy a ticket to dream.
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