What’s your favourite flavour of s**t sandwich?

The calacatta marble floor looked duller today than normal, the thin borders of gold outlining each hand cut tile felt drab somehow, like they needed a pep talk. It was early but the house was already crawling. Cleaners and gardeners moved ghost-like trying to keep out the way, every so often creeping into vision and disappearing again. I padded along the corridor to the kitchen, dropping a towel on the way in the knowledge that before I turned around it would have already been picked up. It had been 972 days since we won the EuroMillions, £184.2 millions to be precise. This was the life we now led, one in which dropped towels disappeared like some kind of expensive déjà vu.

Think of the life we’re going to lead now Charlie, no more worrying about work, you can tell your boss to go screw himself like you’ve always wanted. We can buy that house out in the Kent countryside and never need to lift a finger, all those hours crying about being made redundant gone! No one can ever make us redundant again babe, this is it, we’ve done it.

Obviously when we won we both quit work. Charlotte’s hairdresser friends cooed and doted on her whilst my old ad sales colleagues gave me stiff congratulatory handshakes as if they wanted me dead. At the end of the day, I was a millionaire and they sold crummy adverts in crummy newspapers to crummy brands for crummy money. The house was the first thing we bought, I remember us going on Rightmove.com and searching giddily with no upper price bracket. The sky was the limit and it was like being drunk, freefalling with the knowledge you can never die, just float on this eternal cloud of cash.

I’m going to buy you a mansion Charlie, the biggest one you’ve ever seen, you’re going to have a room for everything you’ve ever wished for, a handbag room, a shoe room, a bloody bath bomb room whatever you want you can have. It’ll have land and we can do whatever we want with it, build a pool, a gym, a tennis court, whatever you want, we can have the bloody rapids from Centre Parcs! 

I walked into the kitchen and pulled a mug out of one of the endless soft close cupboards and placed it under the bean to cup machine I’d bought on a whim last year. It took too long and I yet again considered just getting a Nespresso. I had to squint because the kitchen was so bright, the floor to ceiling Scandinavian windows made you feel naked wherever you sat; like zoo animals on show to the camouflaged gardeners carefully sculpting a box hedge path down to the lake.

I’m going to buy you a boat Charlie, a massive boat you can sail around and cut people’s hair on. It’ll be incredible, you can cut famous people’s hair in Monaco and then when we’re bored, we can move to Capri or wherever the hell you want. Or maybe that’s not big enough, maybe we could do a hairdressing jet! Take people from London to LA, go from Dot Cotton to Dolly Parton in 10 hours!

The lake was still, clouds above grey and threatening in the winter morning. Our sunseeker ‘Lady Lotte’ bobbed quietly in the water, neglected and in major need of a clean after laying unused for a year. I sat down to survey the scene, mug of overly groomed coffee in hand, on an overly groomed sofa which looked better than it felt. Today was the same as yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that; nothing on the agenda other than to enjoy early retirement.

I’m going to buy you a round the world plane ticket Charlie, no more package holidays to Corfu we can go anywhere you want, Hawaii, the Maldives, point to somewhere on a map and we can go. Time will be no object we can go for as long as you want, no more 25 days annual leave, more like 25 years annual leave!

The first year was incredible. We barely came home, the new house just lay empty for months at a time as we ate our way round the world. After the fifth week in Venice we’d started to pine for some home comforts, Charlotte needed her family and I missed baked beans. So we came back, I had a full English breakfast as soon as we landed in Heathrow and we were onto our next project. Charlotte threw herself into four bathroom renovations, a full remodel of the boat house and landscaping the (already landscaped) garden.

I’m going to buy you a business Charlie, something you can own, be your own boss, your own CEO, be the one setting the direction. You can do all the marketing and branding like you’ve always dreamed, spend hours drawing and designing and hire however many people you need to bring it to life. The future you want, I’ll buy it for you.

I didn’t turn the TV on, I liked to sit in silence every now and again. When Charlotte was here the house was always full; of stuff, of mess, of people just living. She’d been gone for 6 months now. I still couldn’t tell you what really happened. After the last bathroom was done she said she needed a new project, which just so happened to be a plumber called Barry. She didn’t even want any money, just said she wanted to get back to a normal life.

I’m going to buy you romance Charlie, our calendar will be filled with get away trips to Paris, Rome, Athens, a hotel filled with flowers waiting for you. I know you’ve always said you just wanted our date nights to be about the two of us but we need to think bigger, think better, think Las Vegas!

I opened my phone to my calendar; a random Wednesday on a random week in a random year. No appointments, no meetings, no calls, just time. It’s funny what money can’t buy you. I’d dreamed of never working, of having endless money and actually all it bought me was people and gadgets to do things on my behalf; to spend my time for me. I looked at my hands, once weathered from playing rugby 7’s on a Thursday night, now manicured and clean, devoid of any stories to tell down the local pub. I didn’t even have any stories to tell Charlotte, my Charlie. She loved my stories and I loved to make her laugh. Our home was nothing without her, it was just a house, a box of bricks with no blood, no warmth. 

I’m going to be a better person Charlie, find my place and purpose. Maybe go on one of those retreats to India, find my inner guru. I know you said I should see a therapist but maybe I’ll find one in India, someone expensive and exotic. We have all this money now I don’t need to go back to that NHS therapist, there’s more important things we can do.

With nowhere to be, I got up and pulled a random set of keys out of yet another soft close draw and headed to the garage. I hadn’t even seen which key I’d picked up, I just stood in the middle of the small car park and clicked the buttons until I heard something open. I was still wearing my pyjamas, but I didn’t hugely mind. The 911 roared to life and the garage door slid up seamlessly, buttons and gizmos all working without having to do any actual doing. I pulled out into the drive, trying to decide which way to turn.

I’m going to find some direction Charlie, I know you think I’m lost and I don’t know where I’m going, but this money has given me direction, I can buy anything I need now, I don’t need to do the work I can just pay for it to happen, surely?

After a few minutes I pulled up into the local village, one of those which had nothing other than corner shop, a post box and a pub with a stupid name. I abandoned the car next to the village green and walked to the corner shop. The village was deserted, which I was thankful for considering that pyjamas had been a poor decision in hindsight. The frost overnight was still hanging onto the shadows cast by the trees over the green, making the Edwardian fronted shop look like something out of a vintage chocolate advert. I’d never really taken that in before, the delicateness of the light which cast it's way through the village.

I’m not going to take no for an answer Charlie, this is our life, we’ve built it together, don’t leave me what will I do with the boat and the house and with 6 bathrooms, I don’t know which towels go where Charlie, I need you.

A bell sang as i entered the shop, the middle-aged guy behind the till looked up and offered a brief smile before tucking his head back down into the local morning paper. I wandered up and down each aisle methodically. Through baked beans I had longed for once upon a time, past the newspapers I’d have greedily leafed through to see what adverts had appeared in a competitor’s issue, past the flowers I’d have considered buying. My life was a shell, I thought money would give me freedom but it just gave me hollow time to fill with nothing in particular.

I heard the shop keeper shout something about whether I needed a hand far off in the distance and shook my head. Without picking anything up I walked back past the till and repeated the same smile he’d given me as I started to leave.

‘All okay mate? He gently asked.

‘Yeah all good’, I replied, just filling time.

‘You’re the chap from up the road right, the one who bought the plot up by the lake, beautiful property that.’

‘Thanks, can’t take any of the credit, my ex-wife was the creative one’. That ended that conversation. I knew he must know who I was, the prick who’d won the lottery and ruined their quaint village with loud cars and a speed boat.

‘What are you up to now?’

‘Not a lot to be honest. People dream about winning the lottery but as you can probably tell from the pyjamas it’s not exactly been the life changing experience I hoped for.’

‘Fair play pal, but surely you have time and the means to do all the things you dreamed of doing?’

‘All I have is time now to be honest, time and no bloody purpose.’ I paused, followed by a few seconds of loud silence which felt awkward enough that it needed to be filled. ‘I don’t know who I am any more, what I want to do, who I want to be, this isn’t free time it’s fucking lost time, it’s like a curse.’

The shop keeper paused again, looking down as if searching for something in the paper until his eyes met mine.

‘Well mate, you just have to figure out what your favourite shit sandwich is.’ The guy said this as if it were the most obvious statement in the world. I hoped I wasn’t opening myself up to a nutter.

‘And that would help me because...’

‘Think about it, most of the time, life is shit, it’s a fact, it just can’t be good all the time. The quicker you realise that, the better. From there, you then need to figure out what your favourite flavour of shit sandwich is. You can’t always eat the best sandwich, you need to figure out which shit one you’d eat over and over and over again and not really get bored of it, that’s your competitive edge, the thing you’ll do that other people won’t do. Basically, you need to figure out what sacrifice you’re willing to tolerate.’

We both let this weird philosophical principle hang in the air for a moment. It made a lot of sense.

‘What’s your shit sandwich?’ I asked

‘Entertaining the weird and wonderful general public like you, takes a special kind of person in my opinion.’

I smiled, in another life we’d have been friends. Still could be friends i supposed.

‘Very fair. I’ve not worked in a long time, or even lifted a finger on anything really, so I don’t even know what the bloody flavours of sandwich are any more, which feels fairly pathetic.’

‘Do you want a job to do, take some time to figure out your sandwich? My shelf stacker quit last week so I’m looking for a new one if you fancy it?’

I’m going to find my purpose Charlie. I know I took advantage, I know I put things before us, before you. I want to change that. I’m going to change that. I’m going to put the time in, become someone who’s worthy of you, worth spending the time with. You’re my everything, my perfect sandwich.