Okay, so you've won the lotter...do you still go to workl?

What would you do if you hit the EuroMillions jackpot?

Buy a Rolls Royce? A mansion? A life in the sun?

How much spending can you do before it just gets a bit… boring?

Because it must get boring sooner or later. You see it all the time with the super-rich. They run out of ideas. One yacht isn’t big enough, so they buy another. The sea isn’t big enough, so they blast into space. Bezos, Musk, and Branson are all chasing their rich-fix amongst the stars these days.

Wouldn’t life be easier if, like you and me, they could get the same thrill from a two-for-one deal on Ben and Jerry’s?

But the real question is this: if you were financially set for life, would you still come to work?

I’ll give you a moment to wipe away the tea you’ve just spat out. There are people out there who would scoop the big prize on Saturday and faithfully report for duty on Monday. Would you?

Let’s be honest, probably not. Possibly you’d have a long holiday, sail around the Med, and buy a penthouse apartment in Mayfair to store all your shopping from Selfridges.

BUT SURELY, AT SOME POINT, YOU WOULD FIND YOURSELF IDLY STARING INTO YOUR COCKTAIL GLASS, SWIRLING IT AROUND, AND MISSING THE CUT AND THRUST OF FRONTLINE SOCIAL WORK.

Our jobs may be exhausting, but they’re also satisfying. If you can forget all the paperwork, bureaucracy, timescales, targets, and hefty layers of managerialism that suffocate the life from our profession. If you can heave all that to one side, beneath it you will find the pure beating heart of real social work. Those moments when you genuinely feel like you make a difference.

And those moments are priceless. Best of all, if your numbers did come up, I guess you could forget all the managerialism. After all, how can anyone manage a lottery winner?

You can’t threaten them, they’d just leave – or buy the whole company and sack you. A private individual can’t really buy a local authority, or course, but it would surely make a difference knowing they could walk out the door at any moment and into the back of a Bentley.

Under such salubrious circumstances, staying in social work might be quite inviting – you could have the best of both worlds. Good deeds to nourish the soul, and expensive cars, jewellery, and fine wine to nourish everything else.

AND YET, SOMEHOW I DON’T SEE THIS WORKING OUT. SOCIAL WORK IS JUST SO HARD - IT’S LIKE EXPECTING A LOTTERY WINNER TO FIX THEIR OWN CAR, OR WEED THEIR OWN FLOWERBEDS.

At the same time, I don’t think the choice is straightforward. Just consider all those times you’ve touched somebody’s life, and made a difference. Feels incredible - right? Lottery winner or not, who wouldn’t want to feel like that?

The problem is that social workers don’t get to feel that often enough. More commonly, they feel frustrated as they sit at a desk, fighting back a tide of paperwork. Social work has become synonymous with such things. Give me a million quid to leave all that behind? No problem. But leaving your clients behind? That’s something else.

What if you could just do the bit you enjoy, spending time with families and offering them support? Would you stay then? Maybe hold onto a few hours a week, in between breakfast at the Ritz and dinner at the Savoy?

But sadly not even a lottery winner can pick and choose the bits of social work they like, which is why I reckon most of us in that position would opt to jet off for sunnier climes, forgetting our IT password for good. Not because we no longer want to make a difference, but because sitting at a computer mindlessly tapping in data is about as much fun as clearing out your own guttering - and when you’re rich, you don’t have to do that either.

And that’s why the idea of a lottery winner pulling on a local authority lanyard is a bit mad. Too bad. Because social work is amazing. At its heart, when it is about one human being helping another, it is incredible, inspirational, even irreplaceable.

The problem is all the drudgery that comes with it. It’s like a Lindt chocolate wrapped in a used tissue. Sweet on the inside - but not very digestible when you could be eating caviar instead.