The National Lottery has been with us for so long that it has become part of the furniture.
There are the brightly coloured signs in the newsagent. The enormous jackpots. The television adverts. The stories about someone whose ordinary life has suddenly been transformed because the right six numbers came up.
And, of course, there are the good causes.
It all seems harmless enough.
I don't think it is.
One of the more corrosive things about the Lottery is the way it sells an illusion of hope to people who often have least room in their budgets for illusions.
The chance of winning one of the life-changing prizes is extraordinarily small. We know that, if we stop and think about it. Yet perfectly sensible people will hand over money week after week because, as the slogan says, you've got to be in it to win it.
Well, yes.
You've also got to be in the sea to be eaten by a shark. That doesn't make it a sensible retirement plan.
There's something interesting going on here. The Lottery doesn't simply sell tickets. It sells a way of imagining the future.
Instead of asking what we might build slowly — by saving, organising, learning, sharing, campaigning, creating — it invites us to dream of the moment when everything changes because fortune smiles on us.
Perhaps that is why I've always found the Lottery more troubling than its cheerful public image suggests.
It takes the ancient human temptation to believe that happiness lies just one enormous pile of money away and turns it into a national institution.
And then it gives the whole thing a moral gloss: some of the money goes to good causes.
I'm glad that good causes get funded. But there is something decidedly odd about constructing a system in which people are encouraged to gamble so that charities, community organisations, arts projects and sports clubs can receive money.
If these things are worth supporting, perhaps we should support them because they are worth supporting.
There is another problem too. Gambling does not fall equally across society. A few pounds spent on a ticket is insignificant to some people and decidedly not insignificant to others. The dream being sold is particularly seductive when ordinary routes to security and prosperity feel closed.
"Imagine what you could do if you won."
Pay off the debts. Buy a house. Help the children. Stop worrying.
Those are powerful dreams precisely because the worries behind them are real.
That makes me more and more uncomfortable.
None of this means I think somebody who buys a Lottery ticket is foolish or wicked. Human beings have always enjoyed games of chance. A small flutter can be fun.
But when gambling becomes a normal, state-sanctioned part of everyday life; when enormous prizes are advertised as dreams within reach; when the proceeds become woven into the funding of things we value, I think we've crossed into something more troubling.
Perhaps the strangest thing about the National Lottery is not that it exists.
It's that we've lived with it for so long that we've stopped finding it strange.
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richard <AT> deckzero <DOT> uk