2018: A year in numbers

6541: Estimated prize value (£). In a world where RRP bears little relation to market value, and some prizes are in any case not available to buy, this figure is naturally informed by a bucketload of guesswork. My day out at the ladies’ Wimbledon final is a case in point. Anyone looking for a vaguely similar experience would be spending £3000 on debenture tickets. Even without access to the hospitality zone, the cost of lunch and afternoon tea for two, along with centre court tickets and a keg of Pimms would have pushed me so far into the red that I’d have been living off glacé cherries and expired medicine for the foreseeable future. Obviously, there's more than one way to skin the proverbial accountant; in the present case, however, the flaying technique is academic: 2018 has been my most successful year by some margin.

1400: Volume of liquor won (ML). With a bottle of Italian gin and a bottle of Irish whiskey in the bag, this has been my best year for the hard stuff. Complementing this, there were also a dozen bottles of beer and a dozen bottles of cider to ease the trauma of parenting. Maybe next year I’ll win some Alka-Seltzer too.

390: Highest-value prize that was nothing to do with tennis (£). These watches were designed by a madman. Some days they make my brain hurt so much that I have to wear something different instead. But aren’t they just the cutest?

378: Value of vouchers won (£). Unlike cash wins, vouchers are great because the cretins at E.On can’t nick them after lousing up your gas bill, again. Most excitingly this year, I’ve had £150 in John Lewis vouchers and £100 to blow on the absurdly beautiful shirts made by JL Berlue. I’ve also had vouchers for Decathlon (£90), Screwfix (£25), the Google Play Store (£15), Starbucks (£10), Toymaster (£10) and Amazon (£3) - the latter coming from the brilliant Ribena promotion where the prizes may have been small, but boy were they persistent.

200: Cash won (£). A £200 injection into the bank account is always great, even if it does end up in some faceless utility company’s slush fund.

90: Number of wins. Despite a couple of dry patches and (all things considered) a relatively quiet December, I’m not far off two wins a week. I’m well chuffed with that!

55: Number of Instagram wins. More than half of my wins came from Instagram this year, but what started as a purple patch regressed into a blue period not long after the summer. Based on nothing more than anecdotal evidence, I suspect this was due to more promoters running comps over multiple channels, and more comps allowing multiple entries, but I couldn't possibly say for sure. Sometimes the ball just bounces the wrong way.

7: Value of spoiled wins after my serum sample smashed on the bathroom sink after my first-born hit the bathroom cabinet like a bull in a bran tub (£). Hilarity did not ensue.

4.69: Value of wombled winnings (£). After finding a suite of McDonald’s Monopoly stickers par terre, I indulged my first-born with a Big Mac Meal, which he tackled like the aforementioned bull in a bathroom cabinet. Temporary adoration ensued.

4: Cost to redeem Lucozade win (pence). Again, still?! That’s two years in a row that I’ve had to pay to receive my “free” bottle of Lucozade prize!

1: Comping mother. Now that my mum has moved down the road I’m doing my utmost to induct her into the comping community (read: nagging and nagging and nagging till she enters certain comps). In the last four weeks, she’s won a Bonne Maman hamper, £30 John Lewis vouchers and posh handcreams and house fragrance stuff from Lavender & Lillie. Considering that she’s only entered about ten comps, that's quite some win rate…

So much for the numbers, but what about the graphs? Well, to be honest, I failed to record a bunch of useful information this year, so my pie charts would be neither use nor ornament. I can, however, offer a long-tail graph to illustrate the distribution of prize value...

As one would expect, most of the prizes were worth under £50. Twenty-one (23%), however, were worth at least £50. Again, I'm really happy with that!

What do the stats say about your year? Let me know in the comments below!

The wider world in 2018

When seasonal devastation abounds, the view through one’s fingers generally provides the ideal vantage point to look back upon the year. As it’s probably too soon to comment on how 2018 has treated me (after all, with a week to go, anything could happen), I find myself instead reflecting on some of my fondest memories from the last 12 months in the world of comping.

Personally, I'm always drawn to those stories with the kind of ridiculously mild drama that only a true comper will really appreciate - in other words, compers' problems.

The classic comper’s problem, of course, is winning more than you bargained for. Traditionally, this entails the logistical challenge of fitting, say, a year’s worth of cheese into a fridge the size of a biscuit. Less commonly, it involves winning a fridge large enough to hold not only said cheese, but also take the biscuit and one modestly sized person to chow in situ.

My heart was thus suitably gladdened when this indeed came to pass in Thailand, back in January, when a couple of lads who had won a refrigerator figured that the best way to get it home was on the back of a moped.

Less obviously droll, however, was Cadbury’s White Creme Egg promotion - a scavenger hunt plagiarised from the world of Willy Wonka, but with additional ick in the golden ticket, if the confectionery suffered anything like as much unauthorised unwrapping as I suspect.

Cadbury hasn't confirmed the volume of product spoilage, but I'm guessing it was outweighed by the value of the column inches the promotion acquired, given that round 2 is being promoted already, although (small print alert) the eggs aren’t being released till January.

When it comes to gaming the system with purchase-necessary competitions, there is of course a line in the sand. For the absence of doubt, contaminating food with cooties is over that line. Likewise, while wombling Lucozade bottles is perfectly acceptable, stealing McDonald’s Monopoly stickers at knifepoint is absolutely not.

I can understand someone's reluctance to munch through that much junk food, but it’s important to know when a promotion simply isn't for you. Case in point: US$300 prize money would never get me sitting in a coffin for 30 hours, but each to their own. As Tina Seelig might say, how you make your luck is a matter of individual choice (and to state the obvious, knife crime is a BAD choice).

For the purpose of clarity, it's always worth distinguishing between fortune, chance and luck. To return to Tina Seelig (with thanks to Di Coke for sharing this article!):

Fortune is things that are outside of your control, things that happen to you. I’m fortunate to be raised by a loving family. I’m fortunate to be born in this place and time. I’m fortunate to have blue eyes. Chance is something you have to do; I have to take a chance. It requires action on your part in the moment. Buy a lottery ticket. Ask someone on a date. Apply to a job. Luck is something where you have even more agency. You make your own luck by identifying and developing opportunities in advance.

A few years back, I chose to be more lucky - and so I am. I didn't get here by magic - anyone who makes the right decisions can make themselves equally lucky - if not more so.

To this end, I hope your 2019 is full of great opportunities and really good decisions!

Did I miss anything? Let me know in the comments!

Prize Unboxing November 2018

A relatively quiet month as far as unboxing goes, but I did also win a pair of tickets to watch Ruby Wax in a couple of weeks time, along with a download code for a videogame. I've definitely had worse months!

Here's the video...

Be lucky!

The #MyAquaphor Challenge

Winter is coming, and the prospect isn’t pleasing. It’s the time of year when the fuel bills rocket while the house sags under the weight of laundry drying indoors. The children are marching school germs and slimy footprints everywhere and the bathroom is arctic when you go for a midnight wee. And as if that wasn’t enough, my hands are cracking apart. But not just my hands - my kids’ hands too. All that beautiful baby-soft skin, unworn by a lifetime of gardening, sunburn and air-conditioning, is on the fast train to calamity.

Everything today's schoolkid needs

They don’t help themselves, of course. It’s bad enough that they don’t dry properly after hand-washing, but then they leave their gloves on the table when they go out to play in the cold and damp. At least mine aren’t warming their hands on the radiators, but it’s only a matter of time.

Such dermatological abuse means one thing: a house full of dry, cracked and irritated skin.

Moisturiser alone is not enough: if the skin can’t retain the moisture, it’s still going to dry out. I’m embarrassed to say that it took me a long time to work this out, but at least I now know that once the clocks go back, it’s time to dig out the water-free balm.

As you can imagine then, when Netmums asked if I’d like to try Eucerin’s Aquaphor soothing skin balm, I bit their (soft, smooth) hand clean off.

For the uninitiated, Aquaphor’s water-free formula was introduced more than 90 years ago, making it a tried and tested classic. It has only seven ingredients, thus minimising the likelihood of allergy. Of those ingredients, perhaps the most important is glycerin, which is proven to improve skin regeneration and improve the skin’s natural barrier function. Once applied, the semi-permeable barrier that it provides can regulate the natural rate of water vapor loss and help the skin to retain the moisture it needs.

Well, that’s the science. In layman’s terms, it’s a waxy affair that the skin needs a few minutes to absorb, so if you need to finger your fancy curtains, be sure to do so BEFOREHAND!

I applied some about an hour ago, and while I’m now completely touch dry, I can still really feel the layer of protection on the tips of my fingers. I can imagine Nordic fishermen smearing this round their chops before a long December day in the North Sea - it really is that good.

The other great thing about Aquaphor is that it is totally versatile. If I’m going away for a weekend, I can leave my lip balm at home, meaning I’ve one less thing to forget. It’s also useful for skin prone to rubbing and blisters or other skin damage due to frequent exercise, as well as chafing and sensitive baby skin - and way more besides.

But why take my word for it? After all, I’m no skincare expert and I’ve been given a free tube - perhaps I’m biased. I asked my son to provide an independent review, and here’s what he had to say.

Could you ask for a better recommendation than that?!

This post is an entry for the BritMums #MyAquaphor Challenge, sponsored by Eucerin.
Discover the benefits of Eucerin

Bonkers

I won watches. Fancy watches. His & Hers fancy watches. They’re made by Mr Jones Watches, and they’re utterly bonkers.

Hand-made in London with a self-winding mechanism, on the face of it, there’s nothing half-cocked about these timepieces - unless you’re looking for some kind of instrument with which to measure the passage of time with any degree of accuracy.

It’s worth noting that the last time I had to consult the instructions for a wristwatch I was six. In that respect, this win has given me an exquisitely novel way to relive my childhood that doesn’t entail wrestling with the hourly chime on a plastic Casio.

While it’s not the first time someone has designed a wristwatch with neither numbers nor hands, this has to be one of the most bonkersest designs yet. It’s like someone copped a snook at the entire history of timekeeping and thought, nah - I’ve got a much better idea.

I’m going to level with you here: it’s not a practical solution. If you’re the type of person who keeps time through quick, furtive glances at their watch, then you’d hate these.

On the other hand, if you want a wrist ornament that demands contemplation before it yields the vaguest insight into matters horological, then this is the stuff of dreams.

I love them!

Touching base...

It's been a little quiet on here for the last few days - that's because I had the absolute honour of appearing on Di Coke's SuperLucky blog. In all the excitement, I've quite neglected my chores, so I'll have to lay off the typing for a few days. In the meantime, if you'd like to see my best Blofield impression, do pop over to Di's most recent Meet the Compers post!

Prize unboxing - October 2018

It's a fairly digestible video this month, although I should apologise for the muck on the camera lens that's making the focus go all screwy. Also, I assure you that the soap doesn't smell of Wickes.

Be Lucky!

The #ACEforSchool Challenge

The bottom of the laundry basket is, for most parents, the promised land. We know that - technically - it has to exist. That’s just elementary physics. Its glory, however, is not for us to behold.

Personally, I’m fine with this: given the volcanic urgency with which my basket spews soiled clothing, the precambrian linen at its lowermost stratum is best left to the experts.

It never stops...

What I can say, however, is that I spend an awful lot of time dealing with laundry - mostly other people’s. As a result, I see things - things I can’t fathom, and things I can’t unsee.

This doesn’t make me special. There isn’t a parent out there who hasn’t marvelled at how creatively filthy their offspring can get themselves, even during the most benign of tasks.

The most obvious danger zone is of course the dinner table. It doesn’t matter how well you’ve drilled your child in table manners before they start reception; within one week of school they’re kneeling on the table and eating soup with their fingers. If you've ever stepped foot in a school dining hall, you'll understand exactly why your children never fail to come home looking like Jackson Pollock’s compost bin.

Then of course there’s the art lessons. Not to boast or anything, but my kids really know how to put the pain into painting. For years, my eldest refused to entertain the idea of whitespace, and instead approached the canvas as a drunken ship dabber might a barge. At night. Without glasses. So well did he gloop up the sugar paper that it was still wet when it came out the kiln. Against such robust artistic expression, aprons and old shirts provide little protection.

As for the genius who had the bright idea to give marker pens to infants in white shirts, if you’re reading this, we need to talk.

I’d go on, but the number of ways kids can filth themselves up grows by the day. This is a fact universally acknowledged, of course, not just by parents but thankfully also detergent manufacturers.

Indeed, it was with this in mind that the kind folks at ACE recently asked a whole bunch of parents to road-test their wares, specifically their ACE Stain Remover spray and ACE for Colours gentle stain remover liquid, to demonstrate how well they tackle stains and grease and keep colours bright and fresh.

I’ve got to level with you here: in the two weeks between receiving my ACE products and publishing this post, my offspring - despite their perpetual grime - somehow managed to stain nothing so badly that it needed pretreatment, so I can’t yet comment on the efficacy of the stain remover spray. However, in case you’re unable to read between the lines here, that translates to a vote of confidence for the stain remover liquid - I’ve successfully purged their uniforms of multiple varieties of food grease, as well as chocolate cake, tomato sauce and glue, not to mention various other stains of unknown origin.

The Eight Deadly Stains that ACE promises to sort

This is great because when my lads eat in their shirt sleeves, I invariably end up tackling the tomato sauce stains with a combination of washing powder and sun-bleaching. That’s fine in June, but at this time of year, not so good.

Victory!

I've also dealt effectively with more bed-wetting than I care to recall and spruced up some shorts I found that were still coated with ground-in muck from several months back.

What's also great is that ACE promises to look after my colours - something that's really important when both my children are wearing dark trousers and navy sweaters on a daily basis.

All I need now is something that will stop my eldest son from insisting on three outfit changes per day. If ACE can do something about this, then the laundry really will be the least of my worries!

This post is an entry for the BritMums #ACEforSchool Challenge, sponsored by ACE. Get help for all kinds of stains with the ACE Stain Helper. http://www.acecleanuk.co.uk/ or to buy head to your local Tesco’s, Morrison’s, Waitrose or Sainsbury’s.

Prize Unboxing September 2018

It's a personal best - the epickest unboxing video yet! Which is to say, epic in the sense of longest, as I've just broken the 15 minute barrier - you have been warned!

The unprecedented scale caused YouTube to blow a gasket, which explains the unusual thumbnail, but I hope you enjoy it anyway.

Be lucky!

Tales of the midnight comper

Purchase necessary comps aren’t generally on my radar. Partly that’s because I can’t trust the grocery pickers at Tesco to put the right goods in my basket, and partly it’s because I refuse to pay for something that I have no intention of consuming. Case in point: I wouldn’t touch high-caffeine energy drinks if I was dying of thirst (I know, my body’s a temple, right?) so I’m hardly going to fill a trolley with them.

Sometimes, of course, such bloody mindedness serves only to spite myself. Consider, for example, the Walker’s Snap & Share comp from 2017. All I needed was one bag - one! - and I could have been off to watch Champions League football or playing Pro Evolution Soccer on one of the 500 PlayStation 4 consoles they were giving away. Instead, I just waited to womble a packet, by which time there was about a fortnight left to enter. Sure, I won an adidas football (and it was the best football I’ve ever won), but imagine if I’d pulled my pointlessly principled finger out?!

Here, I can only paraphrase Beverly Knight: what-ifs are for chumps. The only sensible thing to do is to thank Mr Walker for my ball and move on.

Moving on from what might have been is easy enough, but what might yet be is another matter. In this regard, I’ve had a change of heart. It’s not just that I’ve been spending so long on Instagram that I fancied a change, but also because there has recently been such a glut of prize-heavy instant win promotions that I’d have been an utter mug to turn my nose up.

The most obvious example is the recent Ribena Pick Your Own Gig promotion, through which my wife and I were blessed with more than a dozen bottles of Ribena and a few quids’ worth of Amazon vouchers. To be sure, I missed out on the biggies, but a score of soft drinks is always handy in summer.

I also found the Ribena comp to be a bunch more generous than the Lucozade Born to Move promotion, which I’ve entered religiously and won two prizes: one last year and one this year. I say “won” but the “free bottle of Lucozade” came in the form of a voucher that I had a fortnight to redeem and wasn’t accepted at any major supermarket. It also didn’t cover the full cost of the product, so for two years running it has cost me fourpence to purchase my prize. And I don’t even like Lucozade.

But that’s by the by. More important is the fact that I’m a terrible sleeper. At best, I’ll wake up some time around 3 am and then some time annoyingly close to my wife’s alarm going off, then again when the alarm actually goes off, and again when she actually gets out of bed. Come the weekend, the alarm clock gets put on ice for a couple of days so that the children can wake me up at a similar time instead. Weeknights, my wife will still be working by the time I go to bed, so the odds of me waking up when she turns in are pretty good too. On top of this, one of our children is currently midway through a season of wee-hour nosebleeds and bed-wetting through which it is unacceptable to sleep. And did I mention the gurgling of the radiators? Yeah, that too.

Now, when it comes to winning moment competitions, it’s often said that there are good times to enter, and there are bad. Bad is the peak time - daytime, especially lunchtime and other down times; good is when anyone in their right mind is asleep. And since sleep deprivation has contributed less than nowt to my comping, I figured it was about time for it to start pulling its weight. To this end, I decided to try small-hour comping.

For the first month or so, my success was limited to the Walkers/Pepsi Perfect Match promotion, from which I won a plastic bowl and a couple of tumblers, one of which had got smashed in the mail. To be sure, wins on this scale fall under the umbrella of tiny acorn rather than great oak; however (and more importantly), they also bear out the theory that moonlight comping can indeed bring grist to the mill.

But why settle for grist when there are bigger fish out there, just crying out to be fried? Fish by the name of Freddo’s Big Adventure and Dairylea Super Cool or Super Cheesy.

Why these two? Well, I’d like to say it was because of the prizes, but actually it was because the entry mechanic involved keying in a barcode rather than a unique code, so they required the smallest outlay.

Shining blue light into my face when I should have been KO took about a week to pay dividends: Freddo, bless him, chucked a couple of GoApe tickets my way, while the benevolently bonkers gods of Dairylea endowed me with a Polaroid instant print camera, which for some reason they classified as a cheesy prize, lumping it in with the karaoke kits and Dairylea onesies.

It's not cheesy - it's awesome!

For the absence of doubt, I mean no disrespect to Dairylea, but giving away 150 cameras on top of 100 Samsung tablets, 100 Bose speakers and 100 bikes is definitely bonkers. And - unlike with the Freddo or, for that matter, Foster’s Thirstiest Place on Earth comps - the Dairylea T&C don’t specify a limit on the number of times you can enter each day, meaning that sweat shops full of cheese-wielding comp-mongers are no doubt tapping away 24/7 in the hope of bagging a giant Jenga set.

Speaking of Foster’s, I also won a chiller disk at about 5 am today, so it looks like my bleary-eyed endeavour will be continuing a while longer.

Is that really wise, though? Wee-hour wins taste just as great as their daytime counterparts, but much like the house creaks so much louder at night, so too is the winning buzz amplified. Just try grabbing that shut-eye when you’re still high on that sweet dopamine-adrenaline combo!

The question then is what price a good night’s sleep? For a £150 camera, I’m happy to spend the next day as a crotchety growl-bag. The only thing is, in my twilight stupor I thought I’d won something else - a (genuinely cheesy) disposable camera. Not something that most people would toss and turn the rest of the night over. But then again, maybe people should take more pleasure from not being on the wrong side of a four-penny mugging.

Have you tried small-hours comping? How has it worked out for you? Let me know in the comments below!

Game, Set & Match

There are money-can’t-buy prizes and there are my-money-can’t-buy prizes. For example, I never realised how beyond my means Wimbledon was until I checked just the other day. On the final Saturday, it costs £30 just to walk around the grounds. Sure, you might get lucky and see someone warming up on the outside courts, but if you want to see the ladies’ final, a Centre Court ticket is £170 for the day. And, yes, tickets for the men’s final cost even more. So, assuming I’d managed to get through the ballot system and procure tickets for me and my wife, I’d be £400 down before so much as sniffing a strawberry.

It also stands to reason that if you want to eat there, you’re going to be forking out a small wedge. Sure, ‘tis but £2.50 for a bowl of the aforementioned strawberries, but man cannot live on fruit alone - not when there’s all that cucumber to consider, although at £8.50 a glass, sourcing your five-a-day solely from Pimms’ garnish is unwise in more ways than one.

You can therefore imagine how I felt when Robinsons (yes, the squash people) told me I’d won VIP tickets to this year’s ladies’ final. You can also imagine my strangled squeals of drawn-out frustration that the only person I was able to share this news with for the next hour had no concept of SW19, never mind corporate hospitality, on account of being only four years old.

If you’re thinking that this is unusually good fortune for me, you’d be right. I couldn’t possibly say what something like this is worth, but if it’s not the fanciest prize of my life, then it’s surely a close second, and certainly the most amazing thing I’ve ever won from a tie-break comp.

A tie-breaker? No, I couldn’t believe it either. In five years of comping, my track record with writing tie-breaks can be summarised as follows:

• a nice cake (I was the only entrant); and
• a hoodie from an online smut site (four entrants; three of whom failed to read the brief).

In the latter case, I was actually hoping to win the dressing gown, so even here I was wide of the mark.

Missing the mark is of course an area where it is incredibly easy to excel. In the present instance, for example, I drew a blank for three consecutive weeks before Robinsons took a shine to my suggestion for a new flavour for its Fruit Creations range.

Truthfully, I was never going to win in the first week - there were over a thousand entrants and regardless of how tasty my idea might have been, I always knew that it lacked the mustard to stand out from such numbers. In Week 2, however, I pulled my socks up and tossed in a tennis pun or two.
Nevertheless, despite a massive drop in the number of entrants, it wasn’t my week. In Week 3, I tried putting my recipe in verse form. Still no luck.

By Week 4, then, it was time to go all in. That my recipe was going to have strawberries was a given, but I was also going to saddle it with more tennis puns than would be remotely decent. Thus:

LET me take ADVANTAGE of this opportunity to KNOCK UP something with strawberries - surely you can’t FAULT me there?! It’d be ACE to LOB in some rhubarb PULP too - a MIXED DOUBLE of classic British flavours. But HOLD on a sec - if you really want a SMASH hit of a drink, I’d LOVE to add a little ginger and SERVE with a smile! (Trust me - folks will be making a RACKET about this juice for years!)

Fortunately, it was one of those weeks where nothing succeeds like excess - helped by the fact that the drop-off in entries had continued, and fewer than 350 people had thrown their hat in the ring.

At this point, all that remained was to get a babysitter, book train tickets, buy trousers and, oh, tell my wife!

Procuring rail tickets at short notice is seldom cheap, and this occasion was no exception. What I did not expect was that the most economical way to arrive in London would be to travel first-class. I was also not expecting the coffee to be quite as dreadful as that served in prole class, but there you go.

That a first-class ticket entitles the holder to a free packed lunch along the lines of the Boots Meal Deal is nice, but whether that makes it worth five times the basic apex fare is up for debate. Such digression, however, is moot: any pleasure gleaned from this brief insight into how the other half lives dissolves into grimy dust the moment you board whatever hot, stinking Tube train connects you to Southfields.

On the plus side, the walk to the grounds is straightforward and our conga line down Wimbledon Park Road was refreshingly genteel.

Before I go any further, I must come clean about my ticket kink: I love the physical experience of slapping my ticket on the counter and swanning inside ahead of the Johnny-come-hopefuls. It might sound like mild schadenfreude, but it’s actually far simpler: I just dig on tangible credentials.

For this very reason, being on a guest list stresses me right out. I daren’t look behind me as I’m convinced I’m being shadowed by some fat-pawed security gorilla who’s got me pegged as a cheap ligger.

In reality, of course, no one ever bats an eyelid. The woman at Gate 5 handed me the grounds passes and funny little cardboard buttons, and relieved me of the weight upon my shoulders. Not the whole weight of course, as there was still the matter of locating the hospitality suite - but given the unambiguous guidance in my invitation (literally: it’s just opposite Gate 5) how hard could that be?

In case you’re unfamiliar with the grounds of the All England Croquet and Lawn Tennis Club, what’s opposite Gate 5 is Centre Court itself. So, in the absence of any obvious signposting, we found a chap in an official blazer loitering outside Centre Court and begged directions. And what glorious directions they were - taking us right to the far end of the grounds where the various corporate partners had their marquees - major corporate partners like Jaguar and HSBC, but not Robinsons.

Three further members of staff later and we were exactly where we started - except this time, we noticed the wee notice directing guests to the Robinsons Suite.

And oh, what a suite it was! As I stood there, just a flight of stairs away from the action, I suddenly felt sorry for those poor schmoes slumming it in the suburbs with Ralph Lauren. Inside was air-conditioned and spacious; outside on the balcony, meanwhile, was pleasantly shaded with a birds-eye view of Joe Public and the exquisite flower arrangements. A more perfect spot to sip our first Pimms of the day I couldn’t have imagined.

How's this for a chunky VIP pass?!

As we topped up our vim, two further fantastic things became clear: first, the guests in the room were all compers, so the atmosphere was one of genuine over-the-moon excitement; and second, the spectacle was set to exceed everyone’s expectations, as the second men’s semi was yet to be resolved. To this end, our lunch was brought forward so we could watch two sets of Nadal v Djokovic.

It didn’t take an expert to see that this was tennis of the highest calibre. These guys were so evenly matched that on any other day I’d have described the next couple of hours as epic. However, as the preceding semi ended 24 v 26 and lasted six and a half hours, the rivers of hyperbole were running dry.

Thanks to this unscheduled bonus, our afternoon tea was a bit of a frantic affair. I can’t imagine I will ever neck champagne at such a dangerous pace again, but rest assured plans are afoot for us to get a similar wodge of strawberries and cream next year.

Finally, then, it was time for the headline event.

Mrs Wasabi enjoying the hospitality ...
and if you squint hard enough, you might be able to see the Meghan Markle's barnet

The ins and outs of the match have inevitably been documented by writers far finer than I, so I’ll forgo the details, suffice to say that we were really rooting for Serena, but sadly it was not to be. What we did witness, however, was the climax of a legend’s year-long journey from intensive care to a grand-slam final, followed by one of the most wonderful examples of grace in defeat that anyone could hope to see.

Miss Williams didn’t simply congratulate her opponent for winning her first title, but shared her pleasure in that moment, while praising her for being an incredible person and a really good friend.

As for being the “super-human supermum" that the interviewer suggested she was, she replied, "No, I'm just me and that's all I can be … I look forward to just continuing to be back out here and doing what I do best … It was such an amazing tournament for me. I was really happy to get this far … I can't be disappointed. I have so much to look forward to - I'm literally just getting started".

The fact that one of the greatest winners of all time doesn’t take winning for granted is a massive takeaway, not just for athletes and sports fans, but for compers too. Like any seasoned comper, I have failed to win thousands of times. What’s more, I have every intention of continuing to do so. Indeed, I similarly refuse to be disappointed when things don’t go my way: if I’m looking back, it’s not because I’m lingering on what might have been; it’s because I’m enjoying past successes or learning from previous fails. Mostly, however, I’m looking forward, because I’m just getting started too.

Somewhat satisfyingly, the wise words of Wimbledon don’t end here either. As everyone trickled back into the hospitality lounge, the bartender leaned over to my comping buddy and whispered, “We’re closing the bar in ten minutes, so if I were you, I’d rack them up while you still can.”

For me, this is the best kind of advice as I can process it in a fraction of a millisecond, because, well, I'm just me and that's all I can be.

Prize Unboxing August 2018

So that was August... And I did eventually work out where the Russell Ayto book came from. At least, I think so, anyway!

Be Lucky!

Prize Unboxing July 2018

July has been hot! Not just literally, but in terms of wins too. I've been aberrationally successful, for which I'm endlessly grateful, and bracing myself for a super-drought as the world realises its error and the cosmic balance lurches back into place.

Possibly the first step in this regard was one of my prizes smashing before I got the chance to use it. Fortunately, it was only a small bottle of serum, but frustrating nonetheless.

Also, despite what I say in this video, the coat *is* the one I asked for - I just got muddled with the one I'd ordered for my other son! As for the football, I can confirm that the signatures are from regular civilians whose celebrity is based entirely on the fact that they happen to have the same name as someone else.

Most of my July wins are in this month's unboxing video. The largest, however, I'm saving for a forthcoming post as it really was rather cool...

Hope you enjoy the video - and be lucky!

Football coming home...

The FIFA World Cup used to be the cornerstone of my life. I got together with my other half during the 1998 tournament, and exactly four years later, we were married. Another four years on and we were still gorging on as many matches as we could fit around full-time work. Come 2010, however, our first-born was three months old and did not care for international football - not one little bit.

I was on the afternoon shift at that point, but every time I sat down, he’d wail. Watching Germany dissect England is excruciating at best, but there’s nothing like doing it while you slow dance with a mardy bairn to really put the boot in. It was at this point that I stopped watching football.

That’s not to say I stopped taking an interest, however, as I’d just learned about matched betting - the clever-dick form of gambling where you don’t end up out of pocket as the bookies kindly pony up the stakes for you. Now’s not the time for the full ins and outs of the hustle as they’re way too complicated to explain in a glib aside (though if you are interested, see Nikki Hunter-Pike's post), suffice to say that it was a boom-time for bookmakers running promotions to expand their social media reach.

888Sport, in particular, was on a mission to own the market, and was giving away free bets and branded merchandise left, right and centre - in the space of a year, its various score prediction and caption competitions had provided me with a branded polo shirt, rugby ball, laptop sleeve, three hoodies, two packs of cards and a set of poker chips, not to mention countless free bets and a £60 sportswear voucher.

Then came the big one - the World Cup score-prediction comp. At this point, they really lost their marbles, because in addition to prizes for the overall competition winners, they also encouraged entrants to set up their own mini leagues, and gave these players prizes too. How they worked out a scoring system for the mini leagues I’ve no idea. Truthfully, I wasn’t paying attention. All I knew was that I hadn’t made the top three in the main league, so I didn’t give it another minute’s thought. So, you can imagine my surprise when, a few weeks later, a £120 voucher to spend on sportswear turned up out of the blue.

Sadly, it wasn’t long after this that the penny dropped at 888 HQ and I was barred for being - quite literally -  a liability, as 888’s computers twigged that I was taking more money out of the company than I was putting in, so banned me from making any further wagers.

Disappointing as it was to call time on our relationship, lessons were learned and we both moved on: I stopped messing around and committed myself to comping properly, while 888 approached the next World Cup in a far more austere manner, with any suggestion of a re-run knocked squarely on the head.

Nonetheless, it is a truth universally acknowledged that where there’s a World Cup, there’s a prediction competition, and Brazil 2014 was no different. Filling the void left by 888 was a competition of even greater magnitude and generosity, which the Brazil Tourism Board had opened up to pretty much anyone, anywhere. This giveaway had over a hundred prizes, from vouchers to cameras to various Apple products. I didn’t make the top twenty, but still copped an iPod Nano, which was awesome - well, apart from the £30 of import duty I had to pay to receive it.

As this was my first year of comping during a World Cup tournament, I was only just starting to become aware of the sheer volume of competitions that spring up around it - not just the big-ticket giveaways from the official partners and sponsors, but also the numerous unofficial comps from companies that want to join in the excitement, but lack the deep pockets of companies like MasterCard or McDonald’s. For example, thanks to Carpetright, I walked away with an official England shirt; concurrent with this, I also won a tee-shirt of Archie Gemmill scoring against Holland in 1978 - which rounds out my heritage neatly.

The England shirt has served me well - not because I enjoy sartorial statements of nationalism, but rather because it’s super light-weight and doesn’t cling to my sweaty body when I play badminton. It’s also handy for entering football-related competitions, and to this end finally paid dividends this year when I won a giftcard and football from Screwfix for posting a picture of my best football cheer to Instagram. Considering that Screwfix was an official sponsor of the ITV coverage this year, surprisingly few people were entering its comps. Its daily Facebook giveaways were (as I discovered too late) getting fewer than 200 entrants, while this Instagram comp had barely a dozen. So, a lesson learned for next time is to check out all the TV partners too!

This year, I also won prizes from two completely unaffiliated companies - three £30 Decathlon vouchers and my choice of football shirt from the FIFA store. The football shirt came from a simple tag-and-follow comp on Instagram - again with barely a dozen entries. Unfortunately FIFA had sold out of my first, second and third choice of kit, so if you were wondering why there’s a picture of me on Instagram wearing the Japanese away strip, now you know.

The first Decathlon voucher, meanwhile, came from a prediction comp I’d found via Google before the tournament began. What I hadn’t clocked, however, was that the score prediction aspect was purely for fun, and that the question you had to bat away before entering said predictions was actually the tie-breaker for that round. You can therefore imagine my surprise when the promoter mailed to let me know that my throwaway comment - “5.30” - was one of the most creative responses to the question, “At what point of the working day are you most on top of your game?”

Any criticism you may wish to throw at the weakness of that response is well deserved - I dread to imagine the quality of the rest of the field that week. Still, if ever there was an example of “got to be in it to win it”, this was it. And, since we’re looking for takeaways, it was also a reminder of the importance of reading instructions!

In any case, you can be sure that I upped my game for the last few rounds. And yes, my renewed efforts did pay off, as I made it into the top three for the final two rounds, giving me a grand total of £90 to spend at Decathlon.

The other great thing about this year’s World Cup was England’s progress. Notwithstanding their overreliance on set-pieces and their charmed avoidance of top-notch opposition, the fact that the team advanced as far as it did was a boon for flash comps. To be sure, I drew a complete blank here, but again, some of these comps had ridiculously few entrants, so I’ll definitely be getting my Tweetdeck house in order for 2022.

At this point, it bears repeating that 2022 will be FIFA's first Winter World Cup, and in case I need to spell it out - that means it’s going to clash with the advents. With this in mind, I’m going to get my first prediction in early: it’ll be carnage!

How did your World Cup season go? Or did you focus on Wimbledon or some other event? Let me know in the comments section!

Prize unboxing June 2018

And so to June's wins! This roundup is notable for (a) the absence of the water bottle I won and (b) the awful face I make when my varifocals are sliding down my nose. I really must work on that...

There was also the matter of my Lucozade Made to Move win - but more on that another time.

In case you're wondering, the water bottle came from a local flash comp but didn't come in the post, so I totally failed to capture it on video. I'd apologise but I imagine you're over it already!

Be lucky!

The only way is down?

I’m in decline. You may have noticed that my blog posts are getting fewer and farther between. I’m likewise entering fewer comps, or to be precise, I’m entering fewer interesting comps.

A competition to win a £5000 holiday is, of course, interesting. But that’s not the kind of interesting I’m talking about. Most big-ticket competitions are tediously straightforward to enter and consequently have thousands of entrants. In other words, the chances of winning are very, very small.

That’s not to say impossible - I once won an iPad Mini from a pool of about 2000 entries, but that kind of success has since eluded me, and goodness knows how many comps I’ve entered since then. Not as many as some hardcore compers, I’ll admit, but a healthily obscene number all the same.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I prefer competitions with smaller odds. It’s not just that the likelihood of winning is greater (like, duh!), but the ones that are more challenging tend also to be more interesting.

Unfortunately, my wit has gone somewhat out the window of late. The spike in my first-born’s challenging behaviour is presently celebrating its six-month anniversary and I am wiped out. I used to be smart. I’ve got certificates and stuff. These days, however, I can barely operate a spoon.

Me, when I still had brains. By which, I mean hair.

As a result, I’m failing to enter so many of the effort comps that I’ve bookmarked that I might as well not bother with them at all.

But that’s not to say I’m thinking of quitting this game. Rather, I’m cutting my crack to fit my clock, or however the saying goes.

In my case, that means sticking to Instagram. To be sure, tagging and following is a pretty mindless way to enter comps, but (a) you can do five-minute micro-sessions when you’re grabbing a breather between arguments; and (b) the random draws are less opaque than those for Twitter comps (see Di Coke's post on the subject).

That last point is particularly salient, as it puts Joe Average Comper with 100 followers on the same footing as a comping blogger with 5000 followers. Well, theoretically, anyway. As with any prize draw, there’s nothing to stop a promoter from pulling names out of the hat till they find one they like, but I can’t imagine there’s that many bad eggs out there to make that worth worrying about. And in any case, I’m still managing enough wins to keep it interesting.

The bottom line is that this hobby is fantastically scalable.

If you want a hardcore comping session, then go for it. Enter hundreds a night if that works for you - it’s a numbers game after all. But if all you want is a bit of fun, then go where the odds are smaller. There might not be as many tellies and games consoles, but everyone needs protein bars and gin, don’t they?

How do you change your comping game when life gets the better of you? Do you focus on the big stuff, the fun comps, or simply pull down the shutters? Let me know in the comments below!

Prize unboxing May 2018

A real random selection this month - happy watching!

Mindfulness for compers?

The Mayday Bank Holiday was the hottest day of the year, and while I was out basking in my mum’s garden, I noticed myself enjoying a warm, if slightly unfamiliar, fuzzy feeling. It wasn’t just the sun radiating positive vibes - although that always helps; the long overdue family reunion helped too. But the clincher, if I'm honest, was firing up the coals for the first barbie of the season.

I hate cooking. And yet I love to grill. It’s not just that there’s something primal about it, or that my life zenithed when my first-born was ten weeks old and we barbecued for 20 days solid. There’s also fact that I love reconnecting with my prizes - in this case, the cute little Weber barbecue that I won a couple years back.

Every time I set it up, I smile to recall how it was, until recently, the largest object I’d ever won, and how it arrived on the same day as the least physically imposing prize I’ve ever received: a font.

Sadly, I must confess that said font (Thistle Creek) has had precious little impact on my life. Unlike, for example, the swanky watch I won from a 2015 Warner Bros promotion, which I was using to time the cooking, while sipping my prize lager from the last advent season, and wearing one of the brand-spanking shirts I won less than a fortnight prior.

And while I watched the children guzzle the fizzy drinks we’d fixed with the strawberry purée I’d also won over Christmas, I thought to myself: I’m so glad I decided to be lucky.

In the same vein, when I first started writing this post, I was wearing the sweater I won at Christmas, having just packed away the football shirt I won during the last World Cup and boxed up the night’s leftovers in the Happy Jackson pots I won that same year. This was after making my first-born stop reading his Roald Dahl book and put away his X-Men headphones, both of which I won in 2016, and washing up my wife's flask (won 2017). I’ve also just finished off the chocolate I won last month, and before I pass out tonight, will be applying the fancy eye serum I mentioned a couple of weeks back.

Am I a premier league comper? I doubt it. On the off-chance that I do somehow qualify for the top-flight, I’m very much a Huddersfield - standing under the armpits of giants.

Indeed, I’m in perpetual awe of the many fantastic - and more importantly - dedicated compers out there, whose drive to win the big-ticket prizes is plainly inspirational. People like Di Coke and Nikki Hunter-Pike, for example, spring to mind - and not just because of their success, but also because of all the work they do to support the wider comping community.

Next to these guys, I’m a blatant also-ran. But that's also cool. Comping isn't a sprint race; if anything, it's a marathon. I’ve been in the game for about four years now, and despite a few episodes of mojo fatigue keeping me on the sidelines, the wins have slowly but surely stacked up, and I can confidently say that my “winner’s luck” has manifestly embedded itself into my life. That translates to a constant reminder of what it feels like to be lucky. It also translates to feeling good about myself.

Some might call my win rate unremarkable, but that’s no bad thing! Unremarkable, means replicable. It means that anyone with half a mind to “be lucky” can make it happen! And once you've made it happen, soak it up as much as you can. Every prize is a happy moment made concrete.

To be sure, this isn't mindfulness per se. Nevertheless, if you take time to contemplate each episode of joy that literally passes through your hands each day, then you'll find an awful lot of cheer coursing through your brain. And that's definitely good for your stress!

Does comping make you feel like a lucky person? Do your past wins blend into the wallpaper or do you keep an active eye out for how they weave their way into your everyday life? How does that make you feel?

Prize Unboxing April 2018

With apologies for tardiness, here's the prize unboxing for April. I also apologise for gurning at the camera halfway through when I thought it wasn't recording, and the ceaseless heckling from my second-born.

Be lucky!

A nice problem

There’s a down side to comping: it develops tastes, creates needs.

Take confectionery, for example. It wasn’t so long ago that my idea of aspirational candy was a chocolate Matterhorn. That was back when duty-free shops the world over made like Fort Knox and stacked their king-size Toblerones like gold bars, and Alan Partridge scarfed a lap-full while driving barefoot to Dundee. Without doubt, Toblerone was the acme of sophistication.

These days, however, it's become a staple. Partly that’s because I can get my fix at Poundland, and partly that’s because I have over the last few years won a silly amount of top-end chocolate.

This year, in particular, my wins have become increasingly fancy (or increasingly grown-up, as my lad might say), culminating most recently in this great stack from Octo.

Clearly, this is made for posher folk than I. Consider, if you will, Exhibit A: this 100 g bar of raw white chocolate with salted pistachios retails at £8.50! Translated into Toblerone, that kind of dough would score a kilo of chocolate with enough change for post-binge Alka-Seltzer.

You can probably see where I’m going with this - yep, it’s one of those problems that gets little sympathy: I’m becoming a chocolate snob - worse, a cocoa bore. I’m currently so flushed with the stuff that I’m sprinkling my morning porridge with goji berries coated in raw chocolate. I look like a right middle class ponce, even though I wouldn’t recognise a goji berry if I woke up in a sack of them.

My so-called problem is by no means limited to sugar and spice. I recently won some serum - man serum, to be precise. I was planning to let my wife use it, but at her behest I gave it a go. Which is to say, at her behest and under her direction, as I had not the first clue what it was for or how it should be applied given that my skincare regime had never graduated beyond patching cracked fingers with hand cream.

Fancy serum

And here we are: one week of half-heartedly following her guidance and the dry, flaky bags under my eyes are now just regular bags, albeit marginally less creased. Which is great - but given that childcare commitments mean I can work only part-time, the idea of ponying up £50 for another 30 ml of this elixir gives me the heebie jeebies.

That said, it could be worse. During the advents, I won a month’s worth of la-di-da serum for my wife. It retails at £200, which in terms of sustainability presents a lifestyle choice between slightly smoother skin and feeding our children.

Insanely fancy serum

Suddenly, my Toblerone habit pales into insignificance.

Has comping actually driven up your consumption of things you once considered luxuries?! Let me know in the comments below!

Blurred lines

Obsession. Compulsion. There are times when the difference between the two isn’t so clear. The Great Oreo Cookie Quest is one of those times.

For the uninitiated, this app-based promotion is basically a scavenger hunt where you have no idea what you’re looking for. Actually, that’s unfair - there are daily clues, but in many respects it’s quicker simply to point your phone at anything and everything and hope for the best. (For a better description, see Di Coke's post.)

What’s up for grabs? Well, if you’ve time on tap, it’s easy enough to win yourself £15 of vouchers for the Google Play store. There’s also the star prize - a Galaxy J7 phone - for the first person to find all 390 items.

SPOILER! That prize has already been claimed, so if you’re planning to take part, you might as well put your feet up once you’ve bagged the vouchers.

That is, unless you’re particularly fond of obsessive compulsive behaviour, in which case, the pleasure of collecting items grows exponentially the further you progress. This is in no small part down to the fact that some of the items are nigh impossible to scan.

Take milk, for example. It must have taken me an hour to scan this one.

At this point in the game, I had fewer than ten items to collect, while the player in pole position had only one. So … everything to play for, right?

It had taken a few hours to get this far, and was plainly going to take hours more. By all rights, I should have conducted some sort of cost-benefit exercise with my time, but logic had plainly gone out the window by this point. By hook or by crook, that milk was getting scanned.

Thankfully, a kind-hearted fellow comper put me out of my misery with the following recommendation: froth it up a little and snap from above.

Ker-ching! Item scanned!

I did it! I scanned the milk!

I must have spent just as long fumbling with Google Image Search, trying to find a hatchet that would scan - no easy task when the app thinks they’re all axes. My doggedness paid off eventually, but when I realised I now had to scan an ice axe as well, my heart sank. I must have pointed my phone at a hundred ice axes, only to have the app think they were hammers, nails or, on at least one occasion, a stethoscope.

By now, I’d reached seventh place on the national leaderboard - woohoo! Unfortunately, the player who had been leading the pack had managed to find the last item on the list. Game over, in other words. Except for the fact that I hadn’t checked the T&C at this point, and spent another couple of hours banging my head against the wall, trying to scan pliers and coconuts before having the common sense to check the small print.

By the time I downed tools, there were three items I’d failed to scan, and a further three I’d failed to identify at all. Which was more frustrating I couldn’t say; however, the sense of relief as I was released from my obligations was overwhelming. My shoulders buoyed as their invisible burden was lifted.

Now all that remains is to spend the vouchers - has anyone got any recommendations?

Have you been playing the Great Oreo Cookie Hunt? And if so, how have you got on? Let me know if you need any clues!

Unboxing March 2018

Here endeth the month - and it hasn't been a bad one! Here's a video of me and the short man opening parcels. Not shown here is the £15 in Google Play vouchers that my wife and I both won through the Oreo cookie hunt. I'm not convinced the hours were worth it, but that's another story!

Be lucky!

On belligerence

Sometimes I win. Sometimes I learn. And sometimes I do the same thing over and over again in the hope that things will turn out differently next time.

Some would call that the very definition of insanity. And sometimes they’d be right. Sometimes, however, it’s less clear-cut.

Case in point: I used the same Faces for Florida entry for three weeks in a row. After failing to pass muster on the first week, the likelihood of a subsequent win was slim to nil, but since I didn’t have any better ideas, my only option was to hope the rest of the field had a bad day.

Fanciful thinking? Maybe so, but a long shot is better than no shot, as Steven Bradbury found in the 2002 Winter Olympics when everyone else in the 1000m speed skating final fell over, leaving him to collect the gold.

Unfortunately for me, in this instance, the other entrants blew me out of the water. But on the plus side, I don’t have to worry about taking a volatile eight-year-old on a long-haul flight.

Then there was the time, about three years ago, when I tried to win a Weetabuddy. For the uninitiated, this recurring competition requires entrants to scatter fruit on their breakfast in a sufficiently artful manner that it looks like a face. I chose the path less travelled, and skewered fruit to my biscuit so it could stand up.

As luck would have it, the promoter was looking for balanced breakfasts rather than edible voodoo dolls, and my entry failed to make the grade. Not that I really minded - at that point I was in thrall to the comping monkey on my back, and entering every effort comp I could find, whatever the prize.

But I kept the picture. It wasn’t like it was well composed, or for that matter remotely clever. But I did love how perfectly it encapsulated the absurdity of comping - after all, who in their right mind would pin blueberries to their cereal just to win a fluffy Weetabix? And more to the point, why would anyone even want a fluffy Weetabix?

I can’t answer that last question, but I do know that my mojo was wanting a boot up the jacksie towards the end of last year, and on a whim, I entered the competition again. With the same picture.

Common sense would suggest that having failed once, the picture would only flop again. But common sense can bite me. I won that fluffy Weetabix. And my son loves it. At long last, he can hug his favourite cereal - something I’ll never manage with granola.

So, what’s my point? Simple! Stubbornness pays.

Has your persistence, belligerence or plain old dogged refusal to quit, won you any prizes? Let me know in the comments below!

The Great Oreo Cookie Quest

In case you missed it, Oreo is currently running a massive promotion as part of The Great #OreoCookieQuest - a campaign to celebrate special family moments.

The on-pack promotion will see a whole load of earphones and wireless speakers given away, not to mention a trip to San Francisco for four people (for more on this, check out Di Coke’s post).

I was planning to introduce my lads to Oreos as part of a fun day out; The Beast from the East, however, had other ideas, and effectively snowed us in for the best part of a week.

After three consecutive snow days, the children were getting fractious and clearly needed an injection of joy.

Now, anyone who knows me will confirm that I’m downright tight when it comes to letting my kids have sweets or biscuits between meals. Nevertheless, there are clearly occasions when a small but fun treat is in order. Being held hostage by an arctic tempest is one such occasion.

In such situations, I can understand why some people use biscuits as a form of currency, or possibly ransom payment, in the hope of buying a few minutes peace and quiet. My view, however, is that if you have leverage, it’s best to hold on to it for as long as possible.

To this end, I dangle cookies like the proverbial carrot while I create a learning opportunity for my captive audience. I call it a learning opportunity, but really it’s just me seeing how long I can talk about biscuits before my own willpower gives out and I have to open the packet.

And so, in lieu of a physical expedition, I took my family on a Great Oreo Cookie Quest for knowledge.

The lesson is brief, and comprises the following key facts:

• Oreos are an American institution, having been made in the country for over a century; and
• the traditional way to consume them is to first dunk them in milk.

There’s also the matter of a fun little story about Oreos, which dates back to 2013.

This was the year when another American institution - the Super Bowl - had a hiccup. As hiccups go, this one was a doozy: the lights went out.

This wasn’t major news in the UK; in America, however, where almost nothing gets higher viewing figures, this was a massive deal. The power outage lasted a good half-hour, during which time Oreo’s marketing team seized the opportunity to tweet a cheeky little message: you can still dunk in the dark.

That opportunist tweet got over 15,000 retweets and is still celebrated in marketing circles as one of the best guerrilla marketing plays of recent years.

And it got me thinking in a similarly opportunistic manner - if the perfect serving size for Oreos is two per person, and there are four people in this house, one little snack can probably buy me a whole hour of family joy. And so, a new game was born: the amazing game of DUNK IN THE DARK!

You can probably guess how the game dynamics work, but I’ve made a little video of my son playing, just in case.

It’s worth noting that when it comes to eating biscuits, children have remarkable muscle memory. To this end, I strongly recommend moving the metaphorical goal posts between dunks!

As you can see, this hastily improvised diversion was extremely well received by the little people - and happy little people means happy parents!

Do you know any other ways to turn a tiny snack into quality family time - let me know in the comments below...

This post is an entry for BritMums #OreoCookieQuest, sponsored by Oreo

Unboxing February 2018

Apologies for the lack of posts this month - more on that in due course. In the meantime, here's the fun bit - be lucky!

Unboxing January 2018

What with lots of promoters announcing the winners of their advent comps in January, this month started off really well. Things quietened off after that, with just a couple of small wins for #NationalTriviaDay that I won on Twitter. That’s an American hashtag day, however, so I’m unlikely to see most of those prizes as I directed them to my US-based sister to distribute among her brood  (and I definitely don’t expect those macadamia nuts to last till I next visit!). Luckily, there was a turnup for the books last week, with one prize arriving within 24 hours of winning (result!) and another that I hope to feature in next month’s roundup.

Finally, I should add that this video is longer than it needs to be - sorry about that. It’s just that my second-born was especially taken with one of the prizes, so I indulged him with a little extra camera time. I do hope you’ll forgive me!

Be lucky!

Faces for Florida

Fingers are crossed but I fear we need more tweed! #FacesForFlorida

A prize from The Moon Under Water?

This isn’t a winning story. For a start, there’s no such promoter. The Moon Under Water was a fictitious boozer invented by George Orwell back when the Evening Standard was paying him to write pretty much whatever popped into his head.* It’ll be a long time before anyone pays for my jibber jabber, but then again, the dubious luxury of writing sans client does mean that there’s no one to stop me from doing likewise. So, with this in mind (and with a respectful nod to Mr Orwell, on this, the 68th anniversary of his death), let me tell you about the fabulous competitions being run by The Moon Under Water.

George Orwell: Probably would have had strong opinions on comping. Dunno, just guessing.

The promoters at The Moon Under Water have seen comps on Instagram that fail to mention that they are being run on multiple channels, and they feel this is at best ambiguous and at worst misleading. For this reason, The Moon Under Water promotes its giveaways across all its media channels. It has pinned posts on Twitter and Facebook, as well as attractive creative on Instagram. All these posts direct potential entrants to its website, where every last detail about each competition can be found in its full glory - the entry mechanic, the prize, the T&C - the lot.

The Moon Under Water wants people to engage with its brand. It wants to embed its name in people’s minds so that everyone who has taken part - even if they haven’t won - will associate The Moon Under Water with happy memories. For this reason, it never asks entrants to mindlessly like and share or follow and retweet, because it knows entrants will have already forgotten their name in the time it takes to fulfil those actions. Likewise, it never directs entrants through a mystery tour loop of allied companies it would like them to follow as it knows this will dampen enthusiasm for its brand. It also never obliges entrants to click through a dozen Gleam or Rafflecopter entry widgets, as it knows that ticking boxes is no way to engender brand love.

For this reason, The Moon Under Water always runs effort-based competitions. Sometimes it invites entrants to create an original - and impossible to plagiarise - photograph with a certain item, or something that corresponds with its latest marketing campaign, be that seasonal (say, Christmas) or activity based (say, jumping for joy). Certainly, whenever it asks for a selfie, it publishes T&C that define EXACTLY what the word “selfie” constitutes.

From time to time, its competitions require entrants to submit a brief video clip: sometimes something simple and silly such as mixing the promoter’s name into a tongue twister; sometimes more demanding, such as a sketch or a monologue, that - again - resonates with the latest marketing campaign.

The Moon Under Water also loves tie-breaks - indeed, its company slogan was originally coined via a tie-break competition.

Entries are always limited to one per person. No one gets additional credit for tagging more people, reposting the competition or kissing promoter ass.

Winners are never decided by public vote. Rather, winning entries are judged by an independent third party. Furthermore, winners are contacted directly rather than announced, untagged in a social media post.

The Moon Under Water never extends the deadlines for its competitions. They always close on a defined date - rather than, say, 10,000 followers. Likewise, winners are always announced as scheduled. Winning entries are published on all social media feeds, and, where possible, old posts promoting the competition updated to point to the announcement.

Sometimes prizes are big; sometimes they are small. But whatever their size, they are relevant to the brand and both delightful and useful to the winner. When The Moon Under Water produces merchandise, its mugs are artful, its pens built to last. More often though, it gives away its own product or gift vouchers (as opposed to discount codes) for its online shop, as it knows this will encourage genuine word-of-mouth enthusiasm about its brand. And from time to time, it also partners with like-minded brands to provide bigger - but, crucially - congruous prizes. These additional prizes always complement The Moon Under Water’s product and its present marketing campaign, whether that be in the form of traditional concepts, such as champagne and chocolate for Valentine’s Day, or immersive horror experiences to tie up with Halloween.

What it doesn’t do is give away iPads for the sake of it. Competitions to win iPads are great, but they are ten a penny. They also have no congruence with the Moon Under Water brand. Instead, each prize is carefully considered for the unique circumstances of the promotional campaign in question.

Perhaps you know of a promoter such as The Moon Under Water, or one that runs giveaways with even greater panache. If so, I should be glad to hear of it - do please let me know in the comments below!

*For the absence of doubt, this post bears no relation to the Wetherspoon’s pubs that desecrate Orwell’s vision with such reverence.