What would you do if you were given £2 million?
A question that seems so far out of reach for most of us, but one that a couple from Carlisle are now wrestling with.
On January 13 Ian scooped the top prize of £2 million on The National Lottery’s Monopoly Deluxe Scratchcard.
Ian Black, 61, had just finished his night shift and was driving home when he stopped to pick up a scratchcard from the Esso garage on Wigton Road in Carlisle.
“I scratched the scratch card at 10 past six in the morning and there it was,” said Ian, speaking to Cumbria Crack.
“I scratched the card in the forecourt of the garage. I screeched like a lal lass, thumped the air a few times, hit my hand off the top of my car a couple of times and then went white and started shaking.
“Then I drove home.” He motions as if his hands were shaking on the steering wheel.
But at this point, Ian had still not fully accepted that his life was about to change forever.
“I woke Sandra,” he said. “I shouted up, ‘You need to come down, this is important, you need to check this’.”
Sandra replied: “I came in and he’s shouting ‘Sand, Sand, you need to come down and check this, it’s important’.
“We’ve got three dogs and the male dog, he likes to bark. So he wasn’t barking, so I thought it was my dog.
“So I ran down the stairs and I’m saying ‘where’s my dog?’, but he’s saying ‘no, no, the dog is okay’.
“He says, ‘the dog’s there, it’s not that, it’s this scratch card. Have a look at that.’
“So, I said ‘what am I looking at?’ And he says ‘just look on the bottom corner. And I said, ‘yeah right, okay, that can’t be right’, I didn’t believe it.”
Call to confirm the win
It was not until the couple called Camelot, the operator of the National Lottery scratchcard they had won, that things started to sink in.
“I put it on speaker,” said Ian.
“The woman said, ‘congratulations, it’s a winning ticket. I can confirm you’re a double millionaire. That’s when she (Sandra) went white and went for a coffee.”
As she sipped her coffee with one of her dogs in her kitchen, she began to appreciate exactly what was happening.
“I just kept thinking, ‘oh my god, oh my gosh’,” said Sandra.
“I don’t think a lot of it got drunk, most of it got spilt,” interjected Ian.
“I still didn’t take it in,” continued Sandra.
“It wasn’t until I saw the money and I had to sit down in the middle of Gretna Gateway. I just sat down next to this old lady and I just sat talking to her for about 10 minutes to calm myself down again.”
Have you read?
Carlisle’s £2 million scratchcard winners reveal first purchases after jackpot
Identities of Carlisle’s newest millionaires revealed – cumbriacrack.com
