Spanish Lottery, El Gordo is Addictive

They call it el Gordo, the Fat One. The tickets to this, the world's biggest lottery, are on the kitchen table. They are a painful and embarrassing reminder of my growing, once-a-year, outburst of compulsive gambling. But, with €1.75bn (£1.22bn) in payouts, who can resist?

The tickets came home with my children a few days ago and this year, instead of buying them, I am meant to sell. This €75 (£52) bundle is meant to raise cash for the five-a-side soccer club in my barrio, or neighbourhood, which takes a percentage cut.

It is a reminder that Christmas looms. For the Fat One is as emblematic of the Spanish Christmas as the Trafalgar Square tree or the Queen's Speech is, or was, of the British.

As the years go by I have become increasingly obsessed, despite the Fat One's obstinate refusal to correspond with any sign of a decent-sized prize.

Sometimes, I console myself that I am not alone. After all, the average adult Madrileño shells out €100 (£70) every Christmas on the Fat One. The truth is, however, that my spending is already set to pass that figure.

Why, when the football pools and the weekly lottery draws hold no interest for me, am I annually seduced, enthralled and, eventually, hung out to dry by el Gordo?

I could fool myself that there is something honourable in digging so deeply into my pockets. After all, thanks to a system by which the winning numbers are shared by thousands of neighbours from one town or barrio, it taps into that greatest of Spanish virtues - the love of community.

But I know that my main motive is envy. What if the winning number was sold in my barrio, but I did not have a share? How foolish I would feel if it was sold in the state lottery office in front of my apartment block. While my neighbours popped champagne corks in the street for the television cameras, I would be left sulking at home, cursing my stupidity.

Once you have applied that logic, the rot soon sets in. There are three more lottery offices within three blocks of my home. What about them?

And what about the newspaper shop, the supermarket, the bar, the photocopy shop and anywhere else I frequent regularly? They, like the football club, have also bought shares in one of the 66,000 lottery numbers, which they divide up and sell.

This is stupid, of course. I long ago came to the conclusion that the main prize magically always fell on some small, remote, poor village in Galicia, Andalucia or Extremadura, raining money on those who most needed it.

Did I dream that one up myself, or is that how the Fat One is marketed? It does not matter. It means that, in every village or motorway petrol station I visit between now and Christmas, I will feel an urge to buy still more tickets. This week I had trouble restraining myself from buying one from the Falange, the far-right party.

The strange thing is that, if I did win, I would not even get close to being a millionaire. El Gordo spreads its money widely. To become a euro millionaire I would have to take a €100 share in the winning number - unlikely, even for an addict like me.

Spreading my bets does little good. Accumulating shares in 20 numbers, I calculate that I can expect to win a share in one of the nine big prizes, well, once every 350 years.

After each luckless Christmas prize draw I inevitably recall that the great Fat One winner is really the Spanish finance ministry which will make some €750m (£524) from it this year.

So, should I go and sell those soccer club tickets? A little devil is already telling me not to bother. "Buy them all yourself, then you won't have to share the prize money," it whispers. Now, there's an idea.