Room 237 of the Overlook Hotel
Absolutely skint, the pair of us.
We'd woken up in the same place and clothes that we'd crashed in/on the night before - only now it was nearly midday, and that meant the pub was open!
We scraped around the back of the sofa, emptied bottles for their 1p and 2p coins, and we just scraped enough for 2 pints - 1 each.
We walked up the pub, bought our pints and sat down in our usual spot.
Shortly, we were approached by one of the bar staff and asked if we'd like to buy a raffle ticket for the Sunday lunchtime draw. One pound per strip of tickets, or 20p each.
After buying our one and only drink each, we had exactly 20p left. The top number on the strip of tickets was 237. Both of us realising the (somewhat imagined - in the book the room number was of course 217) significance of the number, we jumped at the chance.
Sure enough, we won a crate (which could be substituted for a number of draft lagers at the bar as and when the need arose) of lager...which, we of course set about consuming straight away.
A few hours later, and once again we were skint.
That's when we noticed a chap on the fruit machine seemingly winning over and over. Every time he pressed the 'Start' button a few seconds later money (or in this case tokens - which, handily could be exchanged for beer at the bar) would tumble out of the thing. It was at the point where the pair of us were loudly exclaiming our disbelief that the chap came over, deposited a large portion of these tokens on our table, look at us, winked and said, "Don't tell the landlord. I'm a fruit machine engineer", then proceeded to his car where presumably he drove to the next pub to repeat the excersise.
Bonus!
We counted up - about 18 quid in tokens. Another 6-7 beers then! Remember, this was a while ago.
A couple more hours pass, and once again we found ourselves in a position of dire straits, so we started the stagger home.
By this time we were both starving and so asked my friends ladyfriend if there was anything to eat. She replied in the negative, being skint herself and having not been shopping for some weeks.
Just as we were resigning ourselves to an evening of hunger, we heard a 'knock, knock, knock' on the back door. This in itself was quite strange as the only access to the back door would have been through the neighbour's garden.
We opened the door to see the neighbour standing there with a large tray of sandwiches all cut into little triangles, which as we all know, makes them taste better.
She said, "Would you like these? We've just had a party for little [insert generic child's name, I can't remember it myself] and none of them have eaten a thing. It'd be a shame to have to throw them away."
Couldn't get them down us quick enough.
Nothing like that has ever happened to me before that, and certainly not since!
It's forever known as our 'lucky day', and is still referred to now when the drunken reminiscence sets in.
(dchurch bah, Tue 3 May 2011, 17:49, 3 replies)

something slightly "Young Ones"
about this story. I like it (I still remember your response to the 'home automation' QOTW. Legend)
( elgordo, Tue 3 May 2011, 17:54, closed)

I was just waiting for the
Indian lady to turn up with the red dot on her forehead.
(username failed moderation, Wed 4 May 2011, 8:17, closed)

"Do you dig graves?"
"... er ... well ... yeah, they're alright, I suppose, yeah ... "

"Well I think they're marvellous!"
( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Wed 4 May 2011, 9:38, closed)