
The Lottery has failed to fulfil its promise. It could be me, but it hasn't been. My literary efforts so far have provided me with shelves full of books in everything from Korean to Norwegian. I may have been big in Japan and a lire millionaire in Italy but have not made the essential break-through that is the short cut to easy street.
So a best-seller seems a reasonable alternative as a way of making a fortune, taking early retirement and buying a holiday home in Mauritius. Or Bridlington.
Look at J K Rowling. She's a bulti millionaire and she wrote about a schoolboy in glasses with a penchant for wizardry and has been acclaimed as the best thing since sliced bread. Or sliced pages. Didn't you know? In Victorian times, you had to cut open the pages of a new book.
Anyway, I had been thinking about writing Harry Jotter, the story of a schoolboy who makes a mess of his school jotter and falls through a hole in time and space when he goes to the stationery cupboard for a new one.
No?
Well how about Wuthering Tights?
A sort of Bridget Jones's diary set on the Yorkshire moors about a young woman cow herder called Kate Beckinsale who falls in love with a good-looking young medical actor from Notting Hill called Hugh Grant and then misses her only chance of happiness because her tights have wuthered and in going to the shop to buy a new pair she misses her romantic rendezvous on the five' o'clock steam train from Howarth station to a new future.
I can just see the final moments of the movie: Hugh leaning out of the window and looking back in sadness through the steam as the train pulls away and Kate, one leg in and one leg out of the tights, hobbling down the cobbled High Street with tears running down her face at her missed destiny (not to mention the five o'clock to Keighley).
"Happiness is not for the likes of thee, lass," will say her toothless crone grandma, pausing from puffing on a clay pipe outside a shop arrayed with the bloody carcasses of skinned rabbits. "Tha'll have to make do with that solicitor from Otley."
Not quite the right tone?
All right then.
How about Indiana Bones (the adventures of a freelance pathologist), Lord Of The Things (two young friends in search of things) or The Codfather (gang boss of a school of cod takes on a killer loan shark).
Apocalypse When? (an American deserter still hiding from the Second World War in Barnsley), Silence of the Hams (a story of unspoken lust in a very bad stage school) and an alternative version of Gone With The Wind (about the rivalry in an international baked beans eating contest in Scisset).
But I shall stick to the classics for inspiration.
Great Expectations seems a good working title for a modern story of one man's hope of a brighter tomorrow by spending all his spare cash on Lottery tickets.
Well, it's easier than writing a best-seller.