A Cambridgeshire couple who won the second biggest Lotto jackpot have vowed “to carry on as boringly and normally as we always have” despite being more than £32.5m richer.
Gerry and Lisa Cannings, from Deeping St James near Peterborough, discovered they had won the rollover prize the morning after the draw on 13 February, but decided to wait until the following Friday before cashing their cheque because they had decorators working on their home and were concerned there would be nowhere for visitors to sit.
“I know it sounds mad but we had a guy in to paint the whole house,” Mrs Cannings, 48, a language teacher at Hampton College in Peterborough, said on Tuesday. “We’d been planning it for ages and had packed everything into boxes. We just thought it would be easier to wait.”
Her 63-year-old husband, a retired history teacher, said he had not been worried about carrying the winning ticket in his wallet for almost a week. “It’s just the way we are – we don’t really worry about things or make a drama. You could say we’re a bit boring like that.”
Mr Cannings said he had always dreamed about how he would spend his winnings if he won the lottery. First on the list was a Spitfire flight for £2,999, adding that the family hoped to embark on a tour of New Zealand.
But he stressed there would be no lavish change in lifestyle – their 11-year-old son Sam would have to wait until his birthday in June to get the Xbox he had always wanted.
Mr Cannings has two other sons – Tom, 34, and Adam, 31 – from a previous marriage, and five grandchildren under four. “We will help them buy houses and make sure they are comfortable, but we don’t want money to take over their lives,” he said.
He had seen a poster advertising the rollover when he went to buy fish and chips on the evening of the draw. “I thought, well, why not? So I went and asked for five lucky dips. And one of them turned out to be lucky.”
The following morning he checked the numbers online. “I read the numbers forwards and backwards three or four times, in a sort of … ‘Oh dear, I think I’ve won the lot.’ I may have used a stronger word than ‘oh dear’ at the time.”
Mrs Cannings said she had taken a sick day on Monday, and had phoned her school shortly before Tuesday’s press conference to break the news.
She had then sent a text message to all her friends and family saying: “Won the lottery jackpot! Catch us on the news! Speak to you soon! OMG!”
She hadn’t decided yet whether she would return to her job, but she added: “All my marking is up to date.”
The win places the couple second on the Lotto rich list, just behind last month’s winners David and Carol Martin and an anonymous ticket holder, who each scooped £33m.
