Today’s prompt is a kind of carnival game, a tombola, a random lucky dip.

When I was a kid, I loved going to church bazaars and village fetes and Christmas Fairs.

Aside from scanning the cheap paperbacks and making a beeline for the bakery stall to see if Carol-Anne’s dad had made his famous tablet, I loved nothing more than the Lucky Dip.

Hand over a coin and plunge your hand into a huge barrel of cold, scratchy sawdust, trying not to get any stuck under your nails. Try not to think about the unfortunate association of the smell of sawdust with all the times somebody threw up at school and the janitor came by with his trusty bucket of the stuff. Rummage around until your fingers find the smooth crinkle of something wrapped in cheap, thin paper. Pull it out and lo! you have a gift. No idea what it would be. It might be something ‘meh’, or it might be something cool like a spinning top or a plastic penny whistle, or one of those little puzzles with the balls you have to roll around until they are all in the right divots; something I could play with all afternoon then shove it in a drawer and re-discover periodically over the next few years.

Whatever I got, it was something I hadn’t expected. And it was mine, all mine!

Below, you’ll find a lucky-dip of sorts, a prompt from the archives of over 500 prompts at StoryADay. It has been generated especially for you!

The Prompt

This is your randomly generated prompt:

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Click on it for more details and tips.

If you don’t like it, refresh the page and dip your hand in the sawdust another time (an offer I never got from the people running the Lucky Dip stall!)

 

Leave a comment letting us know what prompt you got and what you did with it! I’m intrigued to hear how this went.

Photo credit: Tim Ellis (CC BY-NC 2.0)