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Jo Bunting keeps compelling her daughters to enter competitions.

"Congratulations!" announced the letter. At last, I thought, this is it. After resurrecting my hobby of entering supermarket competitions, I had finally won something. The children gathered round in excitement. "Is it that holiday to Spain? Is it a car?" I read a little further. "We are delighted to inform you that you are a runner up in our recent competition." So I haven't actually won it, then. Still, runner up - not bad. "Simply present this letter at your local branch and you will receive your prize of a punnet of plums!" Well, you can imagine the excitement this caused in our household. That's right - absolutely none at all. That's the trouble with this particular hobby - you have to learn to live with disappointment.

I have had some success in the past with slogan-writing competitions, and decided recently that I was ready to try again. It's quite a time consuming pastime, and my ten year old daughter, Lily, knows that shopping trips will now take just that little bit longer. That's because we have to slowly trawl up each supermarket aisle looking out for entry forms, or products with the word "Win" visible somewhere on their packaging.

Nowadays she's rather reluctant to help me find competitions, because more often than not, it means she'll be roped in to some tedious research. A favourite amongst those who set competition questions is the guesstimate type of challenge. "Come on, Lily - you do maths. If a toilet roll is roughly this size, and the boot of a car is roughly this size, how many loo rolls could I fit into the car boot? A thousand? Twelve? Any idea at all?"

Also, we inevitably end up with a trolley load of items none of us want, but which I've had to buy in order to enter the competition. "Mum - I hate that kind of cereal! It's got sultanas in it." "Yes, well the minute your cereal starts offering me the chance to win the trip of a lifetime to the Masai Mara game reserve, I'll buy it again."

The ultimate prize would naturally be a car. That's why I decided to start entering competitions again. And that is my goal. So far, limited success in pursuit of this goal, but I've come tantalisingly close in recent weeks. A shop that specialises in chocolate had a fantastic sports car as a prize in a recent promotion. I came up with what I thought was a pretty brilliant slogan, something about so and so's chocolate being hard to beat, always in the driving seat, and I did in fact win a car… of sorts - a rather small one made of chocolate. Next I attempted to win a family hatchback by buying an unfeasible number of yoghurts. My slogan on this occasion was - I convinced myself - unbeatable. The theme of the competition was how useful this product would be as part of a child's packed lunch, and with the prize being a car, I wrote "This little clutch of fromage frais enlivens brake time every day".

Once again I was cruelly near to winning the first prize, but in fact won a runner up prize of a child's car seat. It's some years since I've had a use for one, so I just left it in the middle of the sitting room for weeks, stumbling over it on a regular basis, until eventually I managed to sell it to a man who ran the mobile fish and chip van and clearly wasn't short of small change. £40 he gave me for the seat - in coppers.

I then decided that we could increase our chances of winning if Lily started entering some competitions for children. "You want me to do what?" she said, as I stood in the doorway brandishing some leaflets. "Design a pair of socks". "What would I want to do that for?" "Because you might win a trip to Disneyland" "But I thought you promised you'd take us anyway, for my next birthday." It never fails to take me by surprise - how bad children are at remembering to give you important messages from school, or how to spell accommodation, but my goodness, make a rash promise that you never had any intention of keeping, and they suddenly develop the memory of an elephant.

"OK OK, forget the socks. But could you possibly help me with my competition? It's from the local paper, and all we've got to do is wander round Norwich, identifying the front doors of all the estate agents." "Give me a pen - I'll do the socks."

I persuaded her to trudge round Norwich in the end - I think I might have made some promise about ending up at her favourite clothes shop and treating her to yet another pair of ridiculous combat style trousers. Anyway, whatever it was, I forgot about it as usual, and I'm glad to say that by the time we'd matched up 34 estate agents frontages to their fuzzy picture in the paper, Lily herself had not only lost the desire to go clothes shopping, but also the will to live. And did I win? Am I now the proud owner of a widescreen television? No, in a word. But ask directions to any of our estate agents, and believe me, I'll tell you where to go.

Just in case I'm coming across as a complete loser, let me say that I did actually win a great prize recently. There's no doubt that it makes all the effort worthwhile when you manage to win something you actually want. I was happy to buy the product - a bottle of a pleasant-tasting liqueur - and I think knocking back a significant amount whilst dreaming up my slogan must have helped. The prize was a trip to one of the country's top health farms for me and three friends. And if there's one thing I really like doing, it's going to health farms - especially for free. The question I had to answer was "How do you like to drink this liqueur?" I can't remember the exact words - in fact, to be absolutely honest, I can't remember filling in the form and posting it, but I must have done - anyway I put something like: In a HEALTHy measure, over SPArkling ice, blah blah blah, paradise. Health, and spa. See? Brilliant!

A few weeks ago, a letter came by recorded delivery informing me that I'd won the first prize.

Now between you and me, I wish it had been a longer stay for just me, but sadly it was a short stay for four people, so that was that. I took two friends, and my 16 year old daughter, Anna, and we spent many happy hours being enveloped in mud and swathed in hot towels, bribing the waiter to bring us forbidden bread rolls to go with our low fat meals, and drinking herbal concoctions in the conservatory. In the evening, we were entertained by a man at the piano who performed a medley of well known tunes from radio and television. Now I don't actually think he was expecting us to start shouting out the titles of the tunes we recognised, and I'm pretty sure that the plan wasn't to turn it into a sort of pub quiz but I have to admit that that's what happened. Anyway, he took it in good part and we had a great time.

If you think about it, it really is rare to get something for absolutely nothing in this life, but entering competitions is one way of increasing your chances of doing so.

Friends of mine who are competition addicts regularly have two holidays a year that they haven't had to pay a penny for. Just imagine - lying on a sun-drenched beach for two weeks simply because you made the effort to estimate how many strands of spaghetti it would take to reach the moon, or expressed what you loved about tinned spaghetti in no more than 15 words."