Sausage supper or bust

Published on Sunday 26 September 2004 01:25

WHAT follows is a tale of sausage suppers and spontaneous haircuts in Scotland’s luckiest town. As I prowl its gold-paved nooks and wynds, from bookie to bingo parlour, amusement arcade to Lotto shop, I sense fate has fingered me for imminent riches. I think back to what the woman from Camelot said when asked for the secret of winning the lottery: "Move to Kilmarnock." I have, at least temporarily, taken her at her word.

I am in Kilmarnock, and there is no question: something in the air tells me this is the day when Mammon smiles on the oppressed, and my numbers - lottery numbers, that is - will come up.

Last week a local woman went out for a sausage supper and purchased her weekly National Lottery chit. Hours later 51-year-old Rosemary Ferguson, an unemployed cleaner, was punching the air and hugging her grandchildren when she realised she would soon be banking 2.2m.

Nothing too unusual about that, except she is the sixth lottery jackpot winner in less than two years bearing a Kilmarnock postcode. Sausage supper? Who says junk food is bad for you.

No sooner had Scottish newspapers dusted down (no pun intended) their "Mrs Mopp cleans up" headlines, than the world’s press were on the case. Kilmarnock - a town of just over 40,000 inhabitants, but with no tourist office or must-see attractions - was suddenly catapulted into the global psyche. The town now has more lottery millionaires per head of population than anywhere else in the UK. From Tokyo to Timbuktu, the place was being touted as a kind of X-File of opportunity, crammed with jammy gamblers who couldn’t lose if they tried.

But is it all a freak of geography, or is luck somehow transferable, a commodity that can be coaxed and nurtured and manipulated to the benefit of an individual? There was only one way to find out: catch the first train to Killie and will the gods to favour the afflicted.

The truth was that I had recently been suffering a lamentable streak of luck, a situation threatening to result in nothing less than financial ruin. If it’s not sinister-looking brown envelopes pouring through the letterbox ("failure to pay may lead to prosecution"), it’s grasping bar tenders and curry merchants demanding a pound of flesh. Two options: acquire a substantial sum of money from gambling tout suite, or demand a salary increase from this organ’s notoriously tight-fisted wages clerk.

Spirits lifted as the train shunted into Kilmarnock, passengers disembarking with a spring in their step and signs in their eyes. It was clear I was not the only fortune-seeker on the 09.53 Glasgow to Carlisle - the Klondyke Express, no less - and the lucky ones among us, the ones who were going to take Kilmarnock for every penny it had, would be returning home by stretch limo or private ’copter.

The gent thumbing Racing and Football Outlook in the opposite seat assured me this gambling lark was a dawdle. "Get your money on Sterling Guaranteed, five o’clock Pontefract. Can’t lose," he said. Great name for a horse, you’ll agree. Mentally noting the tip, I swaggered down Kilmarnock’s main drag, a provocative little boulevard full of shops hinting at financial possibilities (Killie Gold, Quid’s In, Turn Cheques Into Cash).

I clocked a pub called Ocean’s Eleven, named after the famous casino flick. Newspaper hoardings proclaimed "Local granny scoops Lotto millions" and on every corner there seemed to be an amusement arcade or bookies (incredibly, another three applications about to be rubber stamped by the licensing board). Eat your heart out, Vegas.

It was time for the day’s first flutter. "Give me two Nice Little Earners, a Money Bags and a couple of Feeling Luckys," I said to the newsagent. I’m not a greedy man, and was quite happy to start the ball rolling with winnings of, say, a couple of hundred quid or thereabouts. I rubbed the scratch cards in anticipation of an imminent windfall, and was confronted with a kaleidoscope of shamrocks, lucky horse shoes and four-leaf clovers. Close, but no cigar - they were all non-sequential and I was already down a fiver.

Not to worry. Kilmarnock is exactly the kind of live-fast-get-lucky town where losses can quickly be recouped. But the problem with afternoon Bingo is that if you’re the only person in the hall under the age of 90, it tends to raise suspicions among staff. I was put off my game, because I could sense myself being condemned as a potential bag snatcher or, worse, some crank with a pensioner fetish. As a result I did not shout "house" at any point; I did not even shout "tent". Another fiver gone.

Now a tenner down, it was time for drastic measures. I recalled seeing something on the internet about jackpot winners sharing certain traits. People like to identify patterns and one of the quirkier facts about big winners is that many claim to have had a haircut in the days or hours before getting lucky on the lottery. It might be codswallop, but I was in bad need of positive omens.

"I want a baldy and make it lucky," I said to Nicola, top stylist at The Barber Shop in Kilmarnock’s Cheapside Street. She snipped and gelled and rearranged my rug in fine fashion, as I sat cross-fingered clutching a fan of Daily Lotto tickets. Yeah, this is the big one, I thought: tonight’s draw is gonna make me flusher than a Pharaoh. Morningside here I come.

Meanwhile, Dino’s cafe next door provided even more uplifting news. Apparently, Mrs Ferguson - the town’s most recent millionaire - dined at Dino’s before scooping her lottery fortune. If luck is not a random phenomenon after all, and has to be earned, then there was only one course of action I could take... "Sausage supper coming right up, sir," said the waitress.

It all began to make perfect sense in a town famed throughout the UK for its multiple award-winning Killie pies ("say aye tae a pie"). Are you with me, alert reader? Sausages, pies... could there be some kind of meaty supernaturalism going on here, whereby years of guzzling minced mutton somehow results in numerological expertise at the Lotto counter? Alas, locals dismissed the theory as the ravings of a man desperate to fill a newspaper column.

How were local dignitaries receiving the news of Kilmarnock’s sudden newsworthiness? Dave McKinnon, general manager of penurious Kilmarnock Football Club, was upbeat. "If any of these millionaire pensioners wants to invest in the club, I’m sure we could find a place for them in the team."

It was getting late and I still hadn’t cleaned up, so to speak. Halfway down King Street I found a "Casino and Amusements" parlour, complete with in-house autoteller, just in case gamblers wanted to blow even more money without the inconvenience of visiting a bank. The Red Hot Poker machine promised players small fortunes, but all I got was a sore head. Fruit machines used to be pretty simple contraptions, but you’d need a mathematics degree to operate them these days. More cash up the spout.

Remember Sterling Guaranteed, the horse that couldn’t lose? Turns out it was so lame, it withdrew from the race. Still, at least my fiver outlay was returned and as I scanned the racing form in the bookies, something caught my eye and almost floored me. There she was, running in the 6.20 at Crayford, a greyhound called... Sophie’s Sausage. Talk about fate! Someone up there was trying to tell me something, I reckoned.

"A fiver on the snout," I said to the clerk, confidently ushering my stake across the counter. I joined other hopeful punters in front of the race screen, bellowing encouragement from the sidelines. "C’mon baby, shake a leg or four." Sophie’s Sausage came second last.

Needless to say, the evening lotto draw failed to make me a millionaire, and I left town with the shirt on my back and little else. Perhaps you actually have to live in Kilmarnock rather than merely visit it, for a bit of vicarious luck to rub off. Mind you, the chap from Gamblers Anonymous was very understanding when I told him my tale of woe the next day. "Come to one of our meetings and you will be treated like a long-lost friend, but believe me, there is no such thing as a lucky town when it comes to gambling," he assured me on the telephone.

Ach, I needed a haircut anyway.