Rainsticks, lottery wins, hands in the desert…

With too much time on my hands, increasingly I spend more of my time thinking about winning the lottery. Sometimes it looks like the only way forwards is that lottery win . You know the big one - the one that will change my life forever and give me more options than you can shake a stick at.

What would I do with so much money that everything feels like it’s free? How would it be to have such a vast fortune that I never needed to really touch the capitol of my winnings and only spent the interest accumulated? Where would I go, what would I see, where would my whim take me?

The Euro Millions stands at 105 million this Friday. I’ll buy a ticket, I don’t always bother but as I'm talking of whims, sticks and standing…

Standing by the side of the fireplace in our living room is a three foot long stick that looks like a crude baseball bat. When you pick it up it makes a noise that sounds a little like gently falling rain and for that reason it’s descriptively called a rainstick.

We’ve had it for years. Frank bought it for Holly when she was very young. I can’t remember where from though.

Basically a rainstick is a long, hollow tube made from dried cactus partially filled with small lava pebbles. Inside the stick are hundreds of cactus thorns arranged to spiral down its length. Someone with far more patience and as much time on their hands as me, hammers each one in so that when the pebbles drop they catch on the thorns and make the falling rain sound. The longer the stick, the longer the fall of pebble rain – ours lasts about twenty seconds, quite a short shower for the UK really.

They were first made in the deserts of northern Chile and used by local shaman as a totem to make it rain. I shake ours sometimes to bring me luck, not that it seems to be working very well – still you never know.

I really don’t need a rainstick at the moment to make it rain – it’s raining as I write this - but back in the Atacama desert where it’s arid and dry, the Hand of the Desert, a surreal sculpture by Mario Irarrazaba, points upwards to the sky despite being fifty miles and a very hot car ride away from the nearest town.

And there we are full circle, back to the lottery. If I win I’m going to take a trip to the Atacama, have a local taxi drive me out to that sculpture and take a photo of it for my album.

Why? Well, it reminds me of the lottery hand pointing to the sky - ‘It could be you’.

Let it be me.

Sod the rain, I’ll shake my stick for luck.