I don't think it's a sign (I'd like it to be, believe me, which is why the deeply irrational part of me remains forever hopeful) but this really is more coincidence at play than anything else, it's just that every corner I've turned yesterday, and again today, I've bumped into some poster, or if it's happened on the tube, a scrolling electronic news board, radiating this Friday's Euro-millions jackpot. Ninety-five million pounds, which has, it just has, to be won this Friday, or that's it. An awful lot of money in anyone's language.

I can't tell you that this lump sum has my name written on it, partly because it's presumptuous and wholly ill conceived to even think so, but then it will not be until the time I buy a ticket, and from that moment on until the draw...well, you know, my chance is as good as anyother.

This is why I like the lottery, it gets people thinking, and that for me is the seed-bed for creativity. Come Friday, there'll be a collective, communal day dream stretching across the nine participating countries on the "it could... just be me..." angle. All shades and flavours of head trips, fond hopes, star-gazing, pipe dreams, flights of fancy. Millions of us looking at the moon.

There's a bucketful of cynics out there, mocking, sneering, do what you feel you have to, but frankly you're passive in my book, inert, featureless; dreamers, on the other hand, naive maybe, but who else can be matched for creativity. It's about daring to dream, which is how we make progress. I've yet to meet a dreamer who has not got their hands dirty trying to make it substance; I've still to meet a cynic who's moved off the sidelines, stopped caviling and sneering, and tried to do something.