Win or lose

BETTY ELIOT was still in her dressing gown at half past nine in the morning when she spotted the wording on the back of the cornflakes packet.

Win a dream holiday, was the big red message right across the top. Enjoy your Sunshine Cereal in the Sunshine State.

I might as well have a go, Betty thought, reaching for her reading glasses to get a closer look at the small print.

It was the first week of her retirement and she was bored.

To be honest, she hadn’t really wanted to retire at all, but she had to take the plunge sooner or later.

“No more having to get up early,” her friends in the office had said. “You lucky thing!”

“You’ll be able to see more of the children,” her daughter, Julia, had said, miles away in Cornwall. “Come to stay any time. We don’t see enough of you.”

“Think of all the time you’ll have to yourself,” her older sister, Angela, had said. “You can take up a hobby. Grow vegetables, make pots, learn to paint . . .”

Betty could just imagine Angela now, in her big green Wellingtons, with all that dirt under her fingernails and a basket of homegrown lettuces at her feet.

But none of her suggestions really appealed.

It would have been different if Bill were still alive . . .

Betty shook her head and tore the entry form from the back of the packet.

A little trail of cornflake crumbs spilled out over the table as she settled down to study the rules and work on her slogan, pen at the ready.

It was amazing, touring round the supermarket and trawling the internet, just how many competitions there were!

Maybe she had found a new hobby after all.

Now, when faced with which beans to buy, the choice was simple.

If there were cans with a competition on them and cans without, then she chose those with.

Some of the competitions were quite boring, nothing more than prize draws just first out of a hat, although she doubted if any actual hats were involved.

It would all be done on a computer.

For a moment Betty could picture her old office computer between the telephone and the window.

She couldn’t help wondering who sat there now, settled in her swivel chair, getting used to her old keyboard with the dodgy space bar.

There was a new brand of biscuits she’d seen advertised on TV.

Krunchettes, they were called, and one in every 10 packets was meant to contain a voucher for a prize – any