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So she did go to Cambridge, but then there’s always a catch. She was one of the deserving – just a step away from the prize-winning bus-driver novelist – only 23, half-Jamaican, half-English, parents divorced, resident of Willesden. Zadie Smith won a kind of lottery: £250,000 in a two-book deal, and there’s a £5 million BBC adaptation on the way.

There are estates and run-down stretches, but there are also trees, and it’s fashionable, too: it lies just beyond Kilburn, and in the all-important hierarchy of London postcodes it has the respectable-sounding label of NW2 there are houses that go for £800,000. Willesden belongs to a part of the city that doesn’t recognise a centre, where everything you need is in easy reach and you can move from suburb to suburb without ever seeing the London you read about in the guidebooks. At Willesden Green there’s a shopping centre and a library. The streets of low-rise housing go on for ever and the main arteries are well supplied with buses. The newsagent in question is on Willesden High Road, where every shop that isn’t a newsagent is a takeaway. If you buy twenty lottery tickets a week from the age of 18 you will, on average, be 700,000 years old before you win the jackpot, and if Richard Branson succeeds in his bid for the People’s Lottery you’re more likely to be a million. There’s a catch: to be sure of winning you need to have a limitless supply of money. The trick with gambling is this: each time you lose, you raise the stake you put in so that when you win you cover all your losses. At first it was just one: then it was two, four the week after, six the next – until it was twenty, and her chances of winning were multiplied twenty times. I picture her going into the same shop Saturday after Saturday, buying more and more tickets each time. Twenty Benson and Hedges, a packet of crisps – and a clutch of lottery tickets. I looked over to see what she could have been buying. A woman at the counter of the newsagent I was in was charged £25.