Lots of luck in the lotteries
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• Maybe it's all the registration plates that truck drivers see all day, or just another manifestation of the intelligence of CM's readership, but a lot of drivers appear to be winning fortunes in lotteries.
Lost week South Ockendon driver Len Brownlie became the first man to win live on television when he drew one of five envelopes in the NHS Lob lottery. Brownlie's achievement was to beat a complicated set of Gaming Board rules which forbid people who correctly select Five numbers from winning more than £10,000. But NHS Iota allows winners to enter a draw in which they can go on to pick a prize ranging from £50,000 to Elm. Brownlie was the first man to get through to the draw since the lottery began in May. Former driver Bill Owens hit the jackpot at 73 when he won the £15,000 jackpot in the Sun's Bingo. He promises to take his wife Edna on holiday to Benidorm. It'll be a welcome break for Owens, who claims to be "besieged by grandchildren". Poetic ability, not mathematical skill, won US truck driver Jay Mulligan a £100,000 bar in Cobh, County Cork. He is about to give up the Connie Doolan's bar after beating off 31,000 competitors in a Guinness-sponsored competition last year. Mulligan, a 28-year-old bachelor, won every driver's dream prize with a deft rhyme in which he hoped the bar "would change my life, perhaps attracting a wife".
Sadly Mulligan's silver tongue failed to win any Irish hearts but he is returning home to celebrity status as the man who brought culture to the quaint 19th century bar—departure point of many US immigrants—by stocking it with baseball hots and playing videos of memorable ice hockey matches.