As the courier van pulls up outside her front door, Kim
Searle jumps to her feet with a squeak of
excitement.
The driver hands her a white package. Holding her breath,
eyes shining with excitement, she eagerly rips it
open.
Out pops a printer cartridge in its dull grey plastic shrink
wrap package that she’d ordered few days earlier.
Kim heaves a disappointed sigh. ‘Oh well, better luck next
time,’ she smiles.
And there’s a very good chance she will have better luck next
time, because Kim has been winning competitions — for all sorts of
prizes — for 25 years.
Barely a day goes by without some freebie being delivered to
her door.
She’s won prizes to the value of £100,000, including a lavish
trip to Disneyland and a canteen of gold- plated
cutlery.
Yet she still gets the same adrenaline rush whenever she sees
the postman, whether he’s bringing her the holiday of a lifetime or
merely some free dog food for her three rescue collies, Buster,
Monty and Skye.
This week, she’s anticipating the arrival of Lancome
moisturiser and a toy chicken — and she’s thrilled about
that.
‘It’s not about the prize,’ she says. ‘It’s about winning. I
get really excited. Even opening a pot of face cream or a bottle of
shampoo gives me a buzz.
'And everyone likes to get something for
free.’
Bookseller Kim, 51, is no idle dabbler in Sudoku and
spot-the-difference contests.
One of Britain’s most dedicated competition addicts, she
enters up to 100 every day and expects to net at least two or three
prizes every week.
‘My brain has been rewired: competition, competition,
competition,’ she laughs. ‘I spot them everywhere.’ Kim scrounges
tokens from friends’ cereal packets, rips out entry forms from
magazines in the doctor’s surgery and switches grocery brands if a
rival product is offering a prize.
‘And I always enter if I see a competition in a
shop.
'Most people don’t have time to fill in their details, so if
you bother to do it, you’re virtually guaranteed to win a
prize.’
The size of her haul has meant she and husband Dave, 50, had
to move to a bigger house with a garage that can accommodate the
fridge-freezer she won.
In fact, walking into her cottage in rural Powys is a bit
like how I imagine the back rooms at Argos to look: in the hall
stands a giant box overflowing with her latest prizes. On top — a
bizarre piece de resistance — is a shiny red Vileda mop and
bucket.
Still, to Kim this is no ordinary mop and
bucket.
It is a free mop and bucket, and as she looks at it, her eyes
glitter like those of a child presented with a giant
lollipop.
You had to put a comment about why you’d like it,’ she
says wistfully. ‘I just said: “Three dogs.” It did the
trick.’
Underneath are designer men’s shirts she says Dave would
never wear, a Perspex clock, several pairs of odour-control socks,
a collection of bizarre books (including an illustrated guide to
box-making using a spiral saw) and numerous pieces of children’s
luggage adorned with hedgehogs and toadstools (she has no
children).
Kim has also got five ‘really naff’ quilted jackets, still in
their plastic packaging, which are destined for the charity
shop.
But there’s been useful stuff, too: holidays a-plenty, Venice
and Barcelona to name but two.
She also won her toaster, coffee machine, kettle and
sandwich-maker, and her bedroom furniture, all of it, down to the
mattress cover.
Even the T-shirt she’s wearing when we meet was bought with a
prize M&S voucher.
There’s more booty in the sitting room: a 42in flatscreen TV,
a PlayStation...Surveying it all is a 4ft-tall Winnie
the
Pooh bear, still with its tags
on.
‘That was from Toys R Us about ten years ago,’ she says. ‘It
came through the door in a massive box and I didn’t have an inkling
what it was.’
'Now that was an exciting delivery day.'
But why is a middle-aged woman with no children giving house
room to a giant teddy, for heaven’s sake?
‘I love him!’ she protests. ‘And whatever I win, I feel
grateful.’
One of Kim's most exciting wins was a lavish trip to Disneyland.
She has also won tea at the Ritz and a host of other prizes since
her first win, a microwave in 1989
Kim Searle on one of her holiday wins in Venice in July 1998. While
most of the competitions she enters are free, she admits to
spending around £150 a year on her habit