Double down

Things don’t always go according to plan. That’s not to say they’ve gone wrong, of course; it’s just that the outcome, the journey, or possibly both, have diverged from expectation. Parenthood is a case in point. Well, sort of: parenthood is a largely thankless travail where anything and everything you do will be criticised by someone at some point, and the only way your predictions will pan out is if you expect to balls up everything in the first place. But still, just because you’re permanently in the wrong, that doesn’t mean that the whole thing has been a catastrophe. (It’ll still feel like it, sure, but legally speaking, only a small minority of cases are unequivocally catastrophic.)

In terms of prizes, for example, it was barely a fortnight ago that my coffee turned up a few months late, but buddied up with another half-pound friend. Likewise, today, my biggest win of the year pretty much doubled in size thanks to an admin error.

How so? Well, just before Instagram called time on its ‘following’ tab, I found a small-odds competition to win a case of reds from the Sunday Times Wine Club. Within a week of pulling my name from the hat, a dozen bottles turned up at my house. The only problem - and let’s be quite clear, this really wasn’t a problem - was that these weren’t the bottles I was supposed to have won.

Mindful of the fact that someone had kindly just given me a hundred quid’s worth of wine, I most definitely did not complain.

What I did do, however, was thank the promoter, but point out that the bottles weren’t the ones I was expecting, and that while this was absolutely not an issue for me, I didn’t want one of their paying customers to be upset because they were waiting for the box on my hallway floor.

The thing is, while I did prefer the look of the original prize, most promoters reserve the right to substitute prizes, in part or whole, with an alternative of equal or greater value - and I’m cool with that. Had the promoter offered to replace the wine, I would have been happy; had they not, I would still have been happy.

12 of the best

What I was not expecting, however, was for the promoter to say, hold up, that ain’t right - tell you what, hang on to that box and we’ll send you the proper one right away. Truthfully, I’m still rather taken aback.  I mean, if things had gone to plan, I’d have been able to stick all the booze in the cupboard under the stairs. As it happens, I now have a dozen bottles of sauce obstructing the passage through my kitchen. But then, some problems are nice to have, aren’t they?