36 Scratchcards

I never bought a scratchcard until I became a mother. Or subscribed to the Lottery website for that matter. It probably had something to do with the fact that I had cleverly timed my pregnancy to coincide with the worst global recession in living memory. Have you seen how much a pack of Aptamil costs these days? £8! That’s way more than I usually spend on a bottle of wine. As well as worrying about how to afford the basics - heating, shelter, childcare, sufficient Jaffa Cakes - there’s always the university fund to think about. (Though faced with the end of money, certain doom for our planet and total breakdown of civilisation as we know it, I’m not sure having gone to university will have quite the same cachet in the future. Our cherished offspring will be too busy building mudhuts and munching earthworms to fret about what subject to write their dissertation on.)

But it was the Rich For Life scratchcard telly advert that really hooked me in. A guaranteed £40,000 a year for the rest of my life! I wouldn’t have to worry about paying my overdue library fines ever again! Unless we end up in a situation of Zimbabwe style hyper-inflation, of course. In which case £40,000 will probably just about buy you 20 Marlboro Lights and a bag of Hulahoops. The ‘Moderately well-off for the next couple of years’ scratchcard doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, though does it?’ I’m still going to be buying them though. I’ll take what I can get.

15 Jaffa Cakes*

Back in the foggy early days, when your darling baby first came into this cruel world, lots and lots of people came to visit. They all brought biscuits. Even though you were the size of a small beached whale, you ate all the biscuits because somewhere at the back of your mind was the vital piece of information that breastfeeding burned off 500 calories a day. And you’d been through childbirth. You deserved biscuits.

Eventually the people mostly went away, some time after that the breastfeeding may even have stopped or significantly reduced, but somehow the biscuit habit remained and now many months after the birth you are still the size of a beached whale.

This is where Jaffa Cakes come in. Jaffa Cakes have a measly 1g of fat in them and only 46 lovely chocolate-covered calories.

You do the math. There are 12 Jaffa cakes in a packet. 46 x 12 is 552 calories. If you are still breastfeeding, you could theoretically eat almost a whole packet a day and still be calorie neutral. Patently this is the thinking of a mad woman, but there is a logic in there somewhere.

If you aren’t breastfeeding - if not only that, but your toddler is walking, talking and possibly in pre-school - well we hate to be the ones to tell you, but perhaps it’s time to start think ing about eating some fruit. As well as the odd Jaffa Cake. We wouldn't expect you to give up pleasure in life entirely.

* Other orange-jelly based, chocolate-covered sponge biscuits are available.