Take a Break

I've developed an addiction to Take a Break magazine, or more specifically the puzzles therein.

They're all easy but mostly satisfying and you get to win stuff! Big stuff! Like, thousands of pounds and stuff!

But I'm already becoming dangerously obsessive, doing things like methodically reading through a list of 100 winners from a former issue, just so I could work out whether there were any duplicates (there weren't, but it didn't half make me cross-eyed, as did the Spot the Difference puzzle), and whether this meant you shouldn't enter for the smaller-but-more-plentiful prizes (e.g. 50 x £25 Next vouchers) because if you won one, they'd remove your name from the draws for the better items. According to their website, they draw the prizes "in value order." This is not helpful! Not unless they state whether that order is descending or ascending. They don't.

I even tried to win a holiday in Benidorm (on the grounds that it's in Spain, and we have a friend who lives in Spain, and she's always mithering us to go and visit her, although apparently Spain is a big country and Benidorm and Valencia are not close (who new?)), though I rejected one in Tenerife. But now I'm told that Tenerife is better than Benidorm, but I don't care anyway cos I have a child who would love me forever if I took him to Benidorm for a holiday, and I can think of worse things to do. But I probably won't win it anyway. You're allowed to send multiple entries, and millions of people read the bloody thing, so it's probably just my version of the lottery. Unless I enter multiple times... I could become a "comper" like Norris in Coronation St (whose going to break that poor girl Mary's heart now that Rita's heart has been broken and she therefore needs him - it's like a Terrible Heartbreak Spiral, and that's without even mentioning Ken and his boat-dwelling fancy woman (who is terribly alluring - I think I'd fall in love if I met someone who lived on a cute boat too; it's obviously a very effective seduction tool)).

Also, I watched Paul O'Grady the other week and he told Maxine Peake she ought to win Best Actress at the Baftas, and he did a little "Sorry June" aside, but then the other day he was going on about how June Brown wuz robbed cos she was by far and away the best candidate and obviously should have won. Those luvvies, they're so two-faced! I don't actually know who did win, I missed that bit.

Anyway this is what my life is like. You should either be jealous or sneering or both.