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.

21 Kerry Katona

Those who deride Kerry Katona misunderstand her function as a celebrity. It’s not about talent. It’s not about admiring her wit or her sartorial brilliance. It’s not even about wanting to shop at Iceland (though have you seen their party platters of frozen mini chocolate orange profiteroles – delicious!)

We like her, because Kerry Katona exists to make us feel better about our own sorry existences. She has her ups and her downs (some of them captured live on breakfast TV). She gets papped looking less than perfect. She shacked up with a dodgy-ish geezer (we don’t mean Brian McFadden, we mean the other one). She allegedly smoked during pregnancy - um, ok we’re not actually with her on that one. She also gave birth while being filmed for a TV show before going on to have shitloads of plastic surgery – um, ok we’re not with her on that one either.

But Kerry Katona has at least shown some signs of actually being human. Which is more than you can say for the average Hollywood A-lister. What we’re sick of is seeing stars like Nicole Kidman who, at nearly nine months, looked like she was pregnant with half a grapefruit. We’re talking about the types of celebrities who are in their skinny jeans two minutes after labour, doing fourteen hours of Pilates a day or whatever, and who just make ordinary mums, like us, feel absolutely rubbish. Wow, it must be so tough being a celebrity and having a whole flotilla of nannies, wet nurses, personal trainers and make-up artists to make sure you don’t lose a nanosecond of beauty sleep or get snapped looking anything but perfect.

So bring it on, celebrity mums who lose it in the full glare of the public eye - Kerry, Britney et al we salute you.