IN ANY CONTEST with principles, greed will almost always win by three laps, or 10 to 12 if it has been a particularly good day at the track. Which helps explain why the money I hope will buy me a small castle (with indoor plumbing) is far more likely going into a 19th century workhouse or a set of muddy bed sheets, or cheering up a transsexual.

Now I've got nothing against workhouses whatever the century, as long as I'm not carted off to keep the occupancy rate up, or have to sleep on dirty sheets. And while some of my best friends are not transsexuals, the breed is nowhere near making my list of 50 Count 'Em 50 Favorite Phobias of the Millennium.

It's just that in supporting these causes, however ignoble, I'd really like a say. Instead, the folks at Britain's National Lottery go right on spending my hard-earned on things that, frankly, I would never have thought of. Like the 1 1/2 million bucks to transform The Jolly Gardeners pub in London into a solar-powered beer garden.

I suppose you might think that I do have a say, that no one has been holding a blunderbuss to my head forcing me to buy $13 worth of lottery tickets each and every week since roughly about three seconds after the beginning of time. Ah, but there's a rub, as Hamlet or some other fancy cigar once said.

The rub in this case is Greed, with a capital "G" (actually, I prefer Avarice, because it sounds nicer and besides, it starts with a capital "A," like my first name), and in the case of the National Lottery, it comes with a set of gnashers that Tyrannosaurus Rex would disembowel his grandma for.

Twice a week, the lottery offers a top prize ranging from the sterling equivalent of 6 million to a nice round 30 million bucks for a jackpot win, depending upon what percentage of us among the Great Unwashed that Camelot - they're the fetchingly named people running this show - has persuaded to fork out $1.65 per shot at pecuniary paradise.

>From a list of 48 numbers (the ones from 1 through 48), you simply select the six that you think will match the numbered balls when, with much hoopla and razzmatazz, the televised draw is held each Wednesday and Saturday. (This is an event that oft has myself and my bride shouting encouraging messages to the TV, like "Get on with it!" and "Draw, cried the losers!" and "You miserable (expletives deleted)" as the proceedings grind toward their generally fruitless denouement.)

Matching six numbers against 48 sounds easy enough. And the odds of hitting the jackpot are only slightly less than 14 million to one - about the same as those of getting a taxi in New York at 5 o'clock on a rainy Friday afternoon, and a bit better than the chances that the IRS has made a mistake in your favor and is rushing over with the cash.

In that mental realm the British call "Cloud Cuckoo Land," I have spent my lottery fortunes many times over, buying medium-sized castles (with en suite bathrooms and the occasional chambermaid), and cars with digital radios and winged hood ornaments and genuine imitation zebra skin seat covers, and a year's supply of Hershey's chocolate syrup, and a bicycle with only one gear, and two tickets to see "Cats."

In fact, our winnings over six years - mostly a clutch of tickets with three matching numbers, which pay out about $16.50 each - will just about cover this year's Christmas Day dinner tab (less tip) at the Red Lion in Adderbury. But hope springs eternal, as they say, and you can't win unless you play, and a fool and his money. . .

But I digress. The theme of this screed is principles vs. the Big G, and the point in question is the manner in which the National Lottery spends the takings that it doesn't pay out to us ticket buyers. Have no doubt about it, that is a big, big heap - something in excess of $12 billion so far.

Since I do tend to lose more often than I win, it seems I am helping toward the $3.7 million it is taking to restore a workhouse for the poor that was built in Nottinghamshire 175 years ago. And somewhere in remotest Peru, giant guinea pigs are happily, well, making love on my share of the 750,000 smackerinis that the lottery volk are paying out to keep them producing more giant guinea pigs (to what end remains unclear).

These are among the "worthy causes" that have been thusly deemed so as to attract funding from the National Lottery. I have no idea as to just what constitutes a "worthy cause," but it does mean I am helping to pay $55,600 to help jolly up transsexuals and others who, the lottery's Charities Board says, "are uneasy about their sexuality."

It appears that the Gender Trust needs the greenery to lend "confidential support and help" to transsexuals. I would suggest that the only advice needed is for them to make up their minds, and I don't think those four words should cost $55,600 that could be better spent giving each person over 60 in London a free Big Mac, or at least a stick of gum.

I am also not dreadfully keen on shoveling out $46,200 of my - and, admittedly, others' - not very spare cash for the 40 bed sheets that Stephen Turner wants to spread across the River Medway on the eve of the new Millennium. His avowed purpose is to catch the last tide of the 20th century - a project that he calls a work of art that can serve the dual purpose of keeping his helpers from "just getting drunk and watching fireworks."

So you can see my dilemma. I have no choice but to connive with the National Lottery in its program of doing wonderful by doing the weird and wacky. It's either that or a frigid winter at a castle with an outdoor privy.

Thought for the Week: A pessimist is someone who puts prunes on their All-Bran

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