Tiler scoops £2.4m National Lottery jackpot
Wednesday December 15th 2010A self-employed tiler who had just £13 left to spend until after Christmas has won the National Lottery jackpot. 47-year-old Neil Jones from Stoke-on-Trent decided to take a risk on three lucky dip tickets after finding himself with just £13 in his pocket, and no more work until after Christmas. Luckily for Neil and his family, the decision to buy lotto tickets turned out to be a shrewd one after his numbers netted him £2,446,436.
According to the Daily Mirror newspaper, Mr Jones said: “We have just been scraping along. We borrowed some money so we could get through Christmas, knowing that in the New Year there were a couple of jobs possibly in the pipeline.”
Anxious not to let the winning lottery ticket get lost, Mr Jones took it out of his wallet and put it in a Christmas card which he then hid under the carpet.
And while the family is understandably keen to go on a pre-Christmas spending spree, Mr Jones says there are no plans to stop working.
“I won’t stop working now,” he told the Stoke Sentinel newspaper. “I won’t let the builders I work with down. It’s a moral thing, nothing to do with greed – we have always worked.”