Desolate.

I had decided I was going to enter every single one of those competitions you get before the ad breaks of programmes on ITV-you know, Lorraine, This Morning, X Factor….the ones that promise untold riches beyond one’s wildest dreams: £30,000 in cash; a brand new car; a Chanel handbag; a holiday to the Caribbean…

Some of these competitions can be entered via the website, I thought cheekily.  That means they are FREE, and I will avoid the charge for a text message or phone call to enter, which will inevitably run to about £10.  I will CHEAT THE SYSTEM.  I am a GENIUS.

It appears that, yet again, the rule of whatever looks too good to be true, is too good to be true, despite ITV’s valiant attempts to convince us otherwise by parading Jane and Trevor from Wolverhampton in front of us, sitting on their sofa talking about how all their dreams came true when they won £30,000 and a holiday to the Caribbean, not to mention that Rolex watch and ipad mini.  This is because when you actually try to enter these competitions, you have to answer, not an easy-peasy question about which city is the capital of France: Paris, Berlin or Rome, but a long line of intrusive questions about one’s electricity supplier, along with a requirement to provide one’s telephone number so that one can be contacted in the unlikely event of winning….and with a free quote from Npower, some hard-sell telesales and daily nuisance calls from India for eternity.

Well, there was no way I was signing up for that, even if I was going to get £2500 to spend at Primark or free groceries for a year from Morrisons.

Morrisons and Primark?  What sort of people do they think enter these competitions?  Last time I went to Primark, in search of some cheap and comfortable leggings to wear in the immediate postnatal period, I found to my horror that not only do pairs of £3 size eight leggings turn out to be somewhat variable in actual size, but neither of them fit over my postnatal bottom.  And not in an attractive, Kim Kardashian-esque way.  From now on I am going to veto these competitions unless they are offering free groceries for a year from Waitrose.