Paper Monitor
09:21 UK time, Tuesday, 10 January 2012
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
At this time of year, when post-Christmas finances are parlous, Paper Monitor starts to fantasise about scooping some kind of cash windfall from somewhere. Anywhere.
It's a fantasy that has come true for 19-year-old Eloise Hutchinson, who picked up £1,346,840 on the National Lottery.
However, according to the Daily Mail, Ms Hutchinson has not behaved as Paper Monitor would in such a scenario (that is, luxuriating in a bath full of £50 notes, throwing said notes excitedly into the air, immediately ordering the entire contents of the Argos catalogue).
Instead, it transpires, she has resisted the temptation to go on a spending spree,
Indeed, Ms Hutchinson's approach to material wealth is encapsulated by her account of her post-win celebratory meal:
I had soup for starter and a nice pork dish for my main but there was no champagne as I was driving.
Being the Mail, of course, it is not enough to mention Ms Hutchinson's level-headedness. It also includes a sidebar under the heading "And how not to spend your win" detailing the mishaps apparently encountered by fellow teenage winner Callie Rogers, who has been a tabloid regular since landing £1.9m age 16 in 2003.
Alas, Paper Monitor never gets round to buying a lottery ticket. But hopes of instant wealth are not entirely dispelled thanks to an article in the Guardian.
Journalist Leo Benedictus describes how he checked his bank account shortly before Christmas to find his balance had
"This is not the kind of figure that a writer for the Guardian gets blasé about," Benedictus notes. However, after a week it transpired that the money had arrived by virtue of his apparent benefactor mistakenly entering a six instead of an eight in the sort code, and he would have to hand the quarter of a million back.
Paper Monitor is ashamed to admit feelings of schadenfreude. Ah well. You win some, you lose some.
The 
