A different post to the one I had planned!

I had a really busy but lovely weekend. Our local village always holds its village fête on Whit Sunday, but very often it rains, which tends to put a damper on all that hard work. Not so this weekend - it was glorious and the weekend turned out to be superb. I meant to write about our adventures but that will have to wait for another day. You see, I have just read of the death of a lovely lady called Barbara Wragg, who recently passed away at the age of 77. You probably don't know her name (neither did I) but for some reason her story has always stuck with me. You see, in 2000, she and her husband Ray won £7.6 million on the UK lottery - and that same evening decided to give most of it away! They simply decided that they had little need for that amount of money in their 50s and 60s so decided to give most of it away!

Of course they treated themselves to a nicer home and so on but they decided that their pleasure was going to be in donating most of it to good (local) causes. The reason their story rang a bell from years ago was I remember them hiring a coach to take deprived inner city kids to the annual panto in Sheffield, but not only did they hire the coach they went along with the kids to watch the show!

Anyway, of the £7.6 million they gave away a staggering £5.5 million to (amongst others) family and friends of course, 17 local charities. a local hospital to buy a bladder scanner, they bought 30 television sets for a local hospice so that all the children could watch their own TV, they gave money to a local breast cancer unit, they paid for a group of veterans to go on a trip to honour fallen heroes, they paid for 50 war heroes to go to Italy for the 60th anniversary of the battle of Monte Cassino, and so on and so on! To my mind that is how lottery money should be spent! I'm pretty sure we've all had dreams about winning the lottery (I know I have) but I feel the same way these people did and while I would obviously take care of my family, my greatest pleasure would be in giving most of it away. In fact, I already know the names of the first five charities that would benefit! Now all I have to do is win! Still, I suppose you can dream can't you. Anyway, RIP Barbara Wragg - you and your husband did a wonderful thing!

Barbara and Ray Wragg