There is usually one decision that can safely be predicted to follow news of a big lottery win — and Richard and Debbie Nuttall have already made it.
This week it emerged that the couple, from Colne in Lancashire, had won an astonishing £61 million ($123 million AUD) share of a £123 million EuroMillions jackpot prize, in the wake of which both are giving up work.
Debbie has handed in her notice at her civil engineering job, while her accountant husband has told clients he will be stopping work in April, at the end of the tax year.
Along with the new golf clubs, luxury 1200-thread-count bed linen and $247,000 BMW X5 they have already splashed out on, a life of hobbies, cocktails and hours spent by a swimming pool beckon.
And who can blame them?
After all, most of us dream of waving goodbye to the humdrum routines of working life — not to mention the enthralling prospect of telling your boss where to go. Indeed, isn’t that delicious thought what drives most of us to fork out for a ticket in the first place?
Except that, according to Mark Gardiner, that would be a big mistake.
And he should know.
Almost 30 years ago, he too found himself in the glare of a “big cheque” presentation ceremony after he and his business partner, Paul Maddison, scooped a whopping $43 million win — the largest in the National Lottery’s then fledgling history.
The duo ran a small glazing firm together, in Hastings, East Sussex, and while Paul announced his immediate decision to quit, Mark played it differently.
“Whether it was nervousness, or fear of the unknown, I thought, ‘I’m going to keep working,’” he recalls in an exclusive interview with the Daily Mail.
“There was no lightning bolt. It was more a case of clinging on to what I knew. It was my safety rail and I thought I would take time to decide when I was going to let it go. Weeks, months, I had no idea.”
As it turns out, the answer was “never”.
Mark, now 61, cuts a cheerful figure when we meet for lunch near his home in Battle.
Today, he is still a familiar sight tootling round his native Hastings in his Croft Glass van, the name of the company he founded four years before that fateful day in 1995.
Many assume that’s because, to use Mark’s parlance, he’s “skint”, having blown his fortune on “fast cars and fast women”.
In fact, while he did accumulate some of the paraphernalia traditionally associated with a jackpot win — there’s a sprawling mansion with a swimming pool, a fleet of fancy cars in the garage, a holiday home in Barbados, even a yacht — he remains happily solvent, and credits staying gainfully employed as helping to save his sanity.
“I’m hands-on. If I wasn’t with you today, I’d be working,” he says.
“But I don’t have to take any nonsense. And if I want to take a day off on a sunny day then I can.”
For a time, his cool head in the face of his life-changing fortune was harnessed by the lottery operator Camelot, who invited Mark to act as an adviser to subsequent winners.
“I was too honest,” he says.
“People would say to me, ‘Am I going to fall out with my family?’ and I would say, ‘Probably.’
“Although a lot depends on your particular family and your background, of course.”
Whatever people imagine about winning the lottery, says Mark, the reality often turns out to be rather different.
Some winners have seen their marriages fail, family relationships destroyed, or even become penniless in a matter of months in a frenzy of ill-thought-out spending and poor investments.
Others have spoken openly of their yearning to turn the clock back and return to life as it was before.
And, while Mark isn’t in the latter group, he is extremely well placed to reflect on the complexity that overnight wealth can bring.
“The analogy I like to use is that, whatever was going on in your life before — all the little seeds that are planted — the win pours water on them all and up they all sprout,” he says.
“I always say to people that before I won I had a box of problems, but the box was quite small.
“The lottery enabled me to shelve that box of problems, but then someone came along and gave me a much bigger box.”
Certainly, back in the summer of 1995, the “seeds”, as Mark calls them, of his former life were already jostling for position.
Raised by an adoptive mother, Irene, Mark had tried to reach out to his biological parents just months before his lottery win, only to be rejected out of hand by his birth mum’s new husband.
“He told me in a phone call that Mum didn’t want to know me then, and didn’t want to know me now either,” he says.
“I think only someone who’s been adopted understands how that feels. To this day I still retain hope that that may change.”
Aged just 32, he was also in the throes of divorce from third wife Kim — mother to a now 31-year-old daughter — and ensconced with wife number four Brenda, with whom he had another daughter, now 28.
Then there was his business.
“We weren’t ever going bankrupt. We had three staff, everyone got paid, we could go to the pub on a Friday,” Mark recalls.
“But, like hundreds of other businesses, there were times when there was very little in the bank account.”
That all changed when Mark found the numbers on his and Paul’s joint lottery ticket matched the numbers in the newspaper from the previous night’s draw — and realised that their financial problems were behind him.
What they didn’t know was quite to what extent.
“Like everyone, we’d drawn up a list of what we’d need when we decided to play the lottery. A house each, clear off the overdraft, get a new van. I think that got us to £500,000, which we would have been very happy with,” he says.
Instead, they won £22.1 million more than that, and Mark said that alongside the elation, there was instant fear.
“One minute I had £11 and the next minute I had £11 million and, if I’m honest, I was probably frightened. Nothing prepares you for it.
“Camelot didn’t give us an instruction book, there was no manual, we didn’t go on a course; you’re given it, bang, there you go. It’s fairly overwhelming.”
The begging letters arrived almost immediately.
“We were getting sacks of mail by the day at Croft Glass,” he says.
“Some girls were asking to marry me, enclosing pictures, with a pound in the envelope so I could call them back, which made me laugh.”
There were many other, less welcome letters too.
Ex-wives — not to mention ex-girlfriends — came scurrying out the woodwork, claiming they were entitled to their share of his winnings, while other old flames emerged claiming to have borne his love children.
“It felt like every other letter I opened had ‘We act on behalf of’ as the opening line. They were from family, people I’d worked with, someone who thought I’d nicked their pencil case at school — basically, anybody from the past that felt a grievance,” he says.
“It was just so bizarre.”
Even his birth mother’s new husband got in on the act.
“He never came to me directly, but he gave an interview to the papers in which he claimed I should pay to relocate them as the publicity had been very difficult,” he says, shaking his head at the memory.
He shakes his head, too, at a well-intentioned gesture that can only be described as backfiring catastrophically.
In a bid to create a protective “ring of steel” around him, Mark bought four of his closest friends a $193,000 house each.
“It was a way of having a circle of trust,” he reflects.
Except that one by one, they all fell out with him.
“It was complicated,” he says.
“They got called scroungers and were picked on by their friends. You can’t win in some ways.
“If you keep your money close, you’re tight, if you buy a round in the pub, you’re a flash Harry.”
After a love life that can best be described as “chequered”, Mark is now happily married for the fifth time, to Bridget, a former childhood sweetheart who was also — to complicate matters further — wife number one.
They had met by coincidence 20 years after their divorce when Mark turned up to fix her windows.
They have just celebrated their tenth wedding anniversary and have an 18-yearold son.
“I am the happiest now that I’ve ever been and that’s because of Bridget,” he says.
“You can’t buy a Bridget. We married too early, we both agreed that, but we knew we were for each other, if that makes sense.
“And in a way I should apologise to the other women because they were never for me, and in some ways I spent all those other years finding my way back to her.”
Although the lottery didn’t change Mark, he warns it can change the people around you.
That includes his old friend and fellow jackpot winner Paul, who disappeared from Mark’s life after moving to a vast 40-acre estate in a remote part of Scotland, where he lived virtually as a recluse.
When he died at the end of last year, aged 73 — the circumstances remain unknown — there were rumours that he had barely a penny left.
“I’d be pretty astonished if he didn’t have any money,” says Mark, who hadn’t spoken to his friend for 28 years when he died, pretty much, in fact, since the day they collected that massive cheque together.
“Paul was the parsimonious one. In fact, he predicted I would be the one to spend it all, and that if I came begging to him for more he’d turn me down.”
It didn’t come to that, of course, although their friendship was a casualty of their incredible windfall.
“It was odd,” he says.
“We’d worked together every day, we knew each other’s other halves. If we didn’t win the lottery, we would have been having a pint on Friday night. I don’t understand it and now I never will.”
Nor did his money do much to improve his relationships with his now grown-up daughters from whom he is estranged, despite spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on legal fees.
“I tried everything,” he says.
“And all I can say is I have legal files with their names on to show how hard I fought for contact and access and that one day they will read them.”
Not that Mark hasn’t enjoyed the money.
Aside from the beautiful house, holiday home and boy’s toys, he has enjoyed the freedom the money has brought him — not to mention the chance to stick it to his old bank manager.
“The Friday after my win we went food shopping and my card was refused,” he says.
“I went mad, and it was all, ‘Oh, sir, I apologise.’
“But they’d had their chance, so I closed that account.”
Knowledge that neither he nor his family will ever want for money — unless they are “daft” as he puts it — is also a huge comfort.
But, while overnight wealth may bring great material rewards, it will never, says Mark, be a panacea for all of life’s ills.
“The advert says “It Could Be You” — but say it goes, ‘This Could Be You: falling out with your sister; upset with your mum; sued by your ex-fiancee.’
“Are you going to run out and buy that ticket?”
For all that, he has no regrets.
“I wouldn’t buy my friends a house, and I would probably have invested in property rather than carry on with Croft Glass,” he says.
“But overall I can’t complain.”
Although, as it turns out, he does have one, as yet unfulfilled, wish.
“I’d love to be on I’m A Celebrity,” he says.
“Because even money can’t buy you that.”