How £25m lottery winning dinner ladies can escape the perils of wealth
Well here’s a story to warm the cockles of your wind- blasted, storm-tossed, heavy winter hearts. Five dinner ladies who work at the Neath Port Talbot Hospital in South Wales have won more than £25 million on the euro-Millions lottery.
Together with one recently retired colleague, the six-strong Catering Girls syndicate scooped the £25,476,778.30 prize last week, giving them more than £4.2 million each. Woow-ee!
Patients at the hospital are just going to have to do without their steamed sponge and custard for the time being, as the first thing the ladies did was to hand in their notice. The second thing was to book a trip to las Vegas.
‘It has always been our dream, we have always said that if we win we are going to Vegas,’ said Julie Saunders, the syndicate leader. ‘Now we can do it and we can enjoy it and we are going to. Viva las Vegas!’
ladies! let the gods of good fortune bestow a thousand congratulations upon your hair-netted heads. No doubt television companies are vying for the rights to film your trip at this very moment — what a marvellous programme that would be.
And it is hard to think of anyone more deserving of such a glorious windfall than a bunch of hard-working, tattie-peeling, soup-stirring, bread-buttering women who toil unseen in steamy conditions in an NHS hospital.
Joining Mrs Saunders, 56, will be Doreen Thompson, 56, Julie Amphlett, 50, Sian Jones, 54, Jean Cairns, 73 (the retiree) and louise Ward, 37.
This is the beginning of their amazing journey, to Vegas and beyond.
The excitement and delight must be unbounded at this moment, as a new future suddenly unfurls before them.
However, at the risk of intruding on private joy, may I be bold enough to offer a few words of advice?
Since the State-franchised National lottery began in 1994, followed by transnational lotteries such as euro-Millions ten years later, we have seen that lottery-winners do not always live happily ever after, surfing the world on a lovely jubbly wave of cash. Indeed, the escapades of many winners suggest that dealing with sudden wealth can be an overwhelming experience.
A massive win is rarely the carefree spend, spend, spend bonanza of popular conception. For a start, winners have to cope with complicated moral questions about how — or how not — to dispense their new-found wealth. Families and friends will be expectant. Strangers — among them the authors of sacks of begging letters — will be resentful.
ladies of Neath, it might not seem like it now, but a lot of lottery winners end up being losers. Please don’t let that happen to you.
THe first rule and the most important is this — stay friends. Whatever happens, promise me you will remain close to each other no matter what. You have each won a life-changing amount of money and despite what you think now, nothing will ever be quite the same again.
This is a unique experience and you will need each other to cope. So form yourselves into a self-supporting therapy group and promise each other to be empathetic through the bad times.
What bad times, you say? The awful truth is that some friends and family will be mad, not glad, about your good fortune. lottery- winners I have interviewed have said how shocked they were at the number of relatives who would ring up and just boldly ask: ‘How much am I getting?’ Some just ‘expect’ a cut and ‘get angry’ when they don’t.
Quite often, the resentment never goes away. There is nothing you can do about this except be prepared for it — and use it as a way of separating true friends from false ones.
It is important to understand that the reason some people feel bitter is not because you have won, more that the arbitrary, random nature of a lottery win gets to them.
As the money is given away and not earned, those close to the winners often feel they have every right to make a claim on their good fortune.
Be aware that Camelot has had to set up a therapy scheme to assist their troubled lottery players.
This is not for the losers, you must understand. It’s for the winners.
ladies, that is the bad news — but stick together and you will be able to cope. The good news is that you will never again spend another second ladling porridge into plates or scraping 1,000 carrots before lunchtime.
So here’s to the two Julies, Doreen, Sian, Jean and louise — have a wonderful, wonderful time. And remember that perhaps the best advice is, apart from a las Vegas hotel suite, don’t rush into anything. Buy nothing and make no plans in haste.
After your group-break, take a long holiday with your family and allow the shock to sink in before you begin the rest of your life. And if all else fails, you know where I am.