A Feast of Unlikely Stories

awkward, as if his skin was stretched too tightly over
his face, so that he seemed to be perpetually sucking
a lemon. He wore his greasy dark hair in an out of
fashion, side parting. He considered his clothes to be
smart casual but others would call them drab.
On the eve of his 34th birthday, he decided on a whim
to buy a lottery ticket. The next day was Saturday,
his birthday, and it just so happened that he was the
sole winner of the jackpot, 13 million pounds.
The first thing George did was to move out of his
small house in North London and into a grand
mansion in Oxfordshire. Next, he took great pleasure
in employing a butler named Forbes, who was a
plump little man with a well groomed moustache,
who didn’t say much, but was very direct when he
did. After that, he immediately became bored.
George had more money than he could ever spend.
But somehow he still wanted more. He wasn’t
concerned with charities or investments; they
simply didn’t interest him. Instead he decided he
would use his fortune dreaming up over-the-top
ways of selecting numbers for the lottery each and
every week.
The more ridiculous, expensive and ludicrous the
scheme, the more it appealed to George. The idea
had come to him when he remembered how, at a
village fete years earlier, they had run a competition
by marking a grid in a field and setting a cow loose
to see which square it would eventually pat in, the
owner of that particular square taking the grand
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