Last year I bought loads of Premium Bonds, in the vain hope of winning a big prize. Instead I keep winning small prizes (various multiples of £50), which is fun, but is no better Rate of Return than if I had stuck it in my low interest 'Reserve' account that I laughingly set up as a 'Savings Account' but is, in reality, an arms-length current account! And not that arms' length, considering the ease of ATM withdrawals and the simplicity of on-line transfers. This month I won one £100 prize, plus a £50 prize, too. (For my US visitors, at current rates of exchange that's equivalent to about $3 billion).
For some reason, I clicked on the list of National Savings & Investments - High value winners - £5000 or more. Not surprisingly, most of the wins were on bonds bought in the Noughties and Nineties. But one of the £100,000 wins was on a £10 Bond bought in 1965 by someone who lives in Glamorgan (or lived there the last time they notified National Savings of their address). I had a £10 bond for about twenty years until I upped it last year. In all that time, I didn't check its winning status once. I would imagine the person in Glamorgan hasn't checked theirs in decades.
We were trying to work out what sort of person this was. Maybe someone who had the Bond bought as a present as a child and is now forty something, feeling the effects of the credit crunch and mounting prices (I was told in Oddbins the other day that wine has gone up because of the world shortage of glass to make bottles...!).
Someone who bought it as an optimistic twenty-something and recently retired, realising that because of their redundancy from metal-bashing industry in the 80s and their series of insecure jobs ever since, they really don't have a decent pension, and are facing a rather bleak future.
Tuesday morning or Wednesday morning, the post comes; they lift it with heavy heart, another set of bills, too much junk mail, yet more mail-shots for short-listed candidates for Parliamentary selection...oh, that's just Streatham....and an unfamiliar letter. They don't recognise the Glasgow postmark and they open it with a slight frown. A slip of paper flutters out saying you've won the Premium Bonds. They snort in derision. Ten whole pounds of Premium Bonds they bought in the White Heat of Technology, when Harold Wilson had just served his first year in office, Aberfan was yet to happen, Ken Dodd's Tears was Number One*, and Manchester United were Champions (okay, some things stay the same). Never paid up a brass farthing. Well, farthings had stopped being legal tender just a few years before. But there were still twenty shillings in the pound and twelve pence in a shilling.
A warrant comes out of the envelope and printed on it is "£100,000". In an era of lottery wins of tens of millions, it may not seem much...but what a wonderful surprise to this person who had quite forgotten they owned a Premium bond. Or has spent 42 years muttering "I've never won a sausage..."
* cos the Sixties was rubbish for pop music. Fact
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