When the slings and arrows of the lottery deliver up a fortune that is truly outrageous, as onlookers we immediately try to wrestle it into a narrative. Without a narrative, it is just a wonderful stroke of life-changing luck that happened to some other people and didn't happen to us. That's just nauseating  you can't live with that, not even for half an hour. One way to overcome it is to make out that the luck is cursed: the Times yesterday ran with a "tale of two lottery winners", in which the super-lout Michael Carroll had his myriad flaws adumbrated yet again, the number of cars he's crashed given yet again, his ludicrous poetry quoted yet again, to ram home the reassuring message that you can get as lucky as you like, but unless you have some laudable interior qualities you will not stay lucky. This message was reinforced by the contrasting case of Pat Griffiths, a winner so ascetic, so hard-working and unmaterialistic, that although she gave up her job editing the local paper, she hasn't stopped working, hasn't moved house and hasn't spent much more than she (probably) could have borrowed from a bank. "Why would we want to move?" she asks, rhetorically, to underline her deserving nature. "We already live in paradise on earth." Ah, Bisto. I feel better already. The Daily Mail, today, took a more gnomic stab at making sense of the luck. The married winners, sharing between them 45.5m, are from Newport. Wait, wait, there's more  Newport is in Gwent, and Gwent has been home to seven winners (of, er, 8,000). This luck isn't wild! It's Jackpot Valley, it was preordained by the gods overseeing the intersection of good fortune and geomorphology. Of course, there are people who aren't superstitious, and aren't persuaded that Carroll and Griffiths represent the very reaches of good and evil; there are subtler ways we can kid ourselves that life is fair. The Fabian Society did some research a couple of months ago on perceptions of the super-rich and the underclass, and found that, in our urge to believe that money obeys the laws of the moral universe, we ascribe qualities to people, based on their income, for which we have absolutely no evidence. Respondents would freely assume that bankers, for instance, worked incredibly hard and/or had trained for a long time, or that people on working families' tax credit were lazy and had an unusual number of vices. Lottery winners rob us of these false assumptions: none of these people worked or trained their way to wealth. So it has to be a rags-to-riches tale. And you notice that the Liverpool syndicate who won the other half of the money are already being called "call centre workers" to make them sound skint, ground-down and depressed, even though they were mostly in management. Don't blame yourself. It's all useful salve on the suppurating sore of envy. I personally like to tell myself that they'll all blow their cash on drugs and petty property disputes with their new super-rich neighbours.