Luck, and the story of a Countdown presenter's boyfriend.

Today's topic of discussion is luck.

"You make your own luck" we are told. I agree. Kind of.
Some people appear to "luck out" in the womb.

Take this attractive young lady:













That's Rachel Riley the new Countdown girl, standing here (I suspect, intentionally) next to a combination of letters that allows "fuck".
She has been named as the leading contender for the Rear Of The Year, an award that I have been overlooked for, again.

Now here, we have someone who has been particularly lucky already.

A 2.1 in Mathematics from Oxford gives her the brains, and the aforementioned hottness. Not only that, but practically her first job is as a presenter on a much loved Britsh institution. As first jobs go, it's better than Sainsbury's, I can tell you.

But someone else got lucky too, in more ways than one.

I haven't researched it, but Rachel must have a boyfriend.
Probably a pretty ordinary guy. Good looking, of course; he'd have to be, and smart too. But there are plenty of smart, good looking guys around.
Somehow, he had the luck to be in the right place at the right time, with the correct level of physical attractiveness, and the correct personality to impress Rachel. And suddenly, from out of nowhere, you're with that hot girl on Countdown.

That's luck that no amount of "making your own" could match.

Some people aren't so lucky.
We can take it to it's logical conclusion and see the tradgedy of the hundreds (thousands?) of African children born with AIDS every week.

Realisitically, of course, if you have the ability to read this blog, that already makes you one of the most lucky. (I mean in terms of having access to the internet, literacy, and a warm living environment, as opposed to purely the shameless promotion of my blog as a piece of essential reading). Some of us have it more difficult than others, but we've all been pretty lucky.

When we see how lucky Rachel Riley and Rachel Riley's boyfriend are, and how unlucky some of the starving or diseased, it seems that luck is one of the least fair commodities in all of nature, and the West appears to have a pretty firm monopoly on it.