Did you know that crisps and lottery scratchcards have a lot in common? ask Sheena Grant.

I didn’t either, until I met up with a friend who told me she was hoping to win a holiday in a competition being run by a well-known crisp maker.

All you had to do, she informed me, was go online and key in a code found on promotional packets to get a letter. Hopefully, your letters would eventually spell the name of a destination in the promotion and you’d win a holiday.

“I only need a C for Nice and a K for Phuket,” she said. “There are 20,000 holidays on offer so I must stand a chance.”

She even had her children collecting empty crisp packets in the school dinner hall to track down those elusive last letters.

I think she’s still looking, but now so am I, because for some unfathomable reason I’ve started collecting those infernal crisp packets too.

Usually, I rarely buy crisps. Now I’m buying them in bulk, reasoning that if I spend £1 on a pack of six, that’s 16p a packet, compared to 55p you pay for a single bag.

The trouble is, because I’m buying those crisps, I’m also eating them. The other trouble is that after 24 letters (including four Ps and three Ns) I’m now only a C away from a holiday in Nice, Funchal and Munich. I’d prefer Nice but have vaguely wondered if I’d win three holidays, should that C turn up. The temptation to buy up warehouses full of crisps is strong, hence my contention that this competition is a bit like a lottery scratchcard. It fools you into thinking you’re so close to the jackpot that it’s worth one more go. And one more and...

Thankfully, I’m still in touch with reality enough to know that stockpiling crisps (or lottery scratchcards) would be foolish on many levels. It doesn’t take a genius to work out there aren’t many Cs or Ks around and in reality I know there’s only going to be one really big winner when it comes to this holiday game. After all, I’ve already spent several pounds on crisps I wouldn’t otherwise have bought, as have millions of others.

According to one online video, the odds of winning a “crisp holiday” are at least 56,000 to one. I don’t know if that’s right but it puts it in context. Even so, the odds are still better than scooping a scratchcard jackpot, so maybe I’ll carry on for a little longer yet...

What letters are you looking fot? Tweet #ThriftyLiving