John Woodhouse: Will £45m lottery win buy happiness in South Wales?

LAST week Les Scadding was an unemployed lorry driver. This week he's still an unemployed lorry driver, but he also qualifies for the Sunday Times Rich List.

Once a week for 12 years Les had bought two EuroMillions lottery tickets from Tesco. Then last week his numbers came up. He is now £45 million richer and shops at Waitrose.

Les offers reassurance for all of us who live our lives in an utterly hopeless cause. When you reach a certain age and realise that sporting greatness/international pop stardom/receiving a pay-off from Stoke-on-Trent City Council has passed you by, the only hope for riches comes from those six numbers scrawled on the lottery slip every Saturday.

Some say that a lottery win doesn't buy you happiness. On the other hand it's more likely to put a smile on your face than the state pension.

Having said that, what you do with £45 million in Les and wife Samantha's hometown of Newport, South Wales, I'm unsure. I've been through Newport on the train and I recall it as a fairly desperate place. For certain, it's the only time I've witnessed the sheep in the fields throwing themselves bodily under the engine.

Let's face it, South Wales has rarely been known as a millionaires' playground. There's only so far a region can go on the back of choir singing and lava bread. Even Ivor The Engine has voluntarily turned himself in for scrap. And when was the last time you saw Shirley Bassey on the karaoke at Butlins, Barry Island?

Personally I've never played the EuroMillions game. To my mind, I've got little enough chance of winning the normal lottery without pitching myself against the occupants of nine other countries as well. I'm no Europhobe – no-one enjoys a bottle of Lambrini and a frozen pizza more than me – but I don't want to be adding to the personal fortune of Juan, Sven, and Igor if it can be at all avoided. Let's face it, enough of our hard-earned cash crossed the Channel when Fred Goodwin went to live in France.

However, in the wake of Les and Samantha's win, even I may be tempted to take part. Forty-five million is a serious amount of money, and how good would it be to turn down Alastair Darling when he rings for a loan? And it would be nice, just for once, not to have to buy my Y-fronts off the market.

The other EuroMillions winning ticket, claiming the other half of £91m, belonged to a seven-strong syndicate of IT workers in Liverpool. And it was exceptionally pleasing to see that, when they heard of their good fortune, all seven resigned on the spot. There's nothing worse than a lottery winner who carries on working. Surely your only consideration regarding work once you've won the lottery is whose desk to put the dog muck in.

There was, however, a sad side to the Liverpool win. One young woman missed out on the bonanza after dropping out of the syndicate to save money. How sick must she have been when she found out that everyone else was £7m richer? I wondered what it was at the time, but I'm thinking now how that explains the gut-wrenching scream I heard tearing across the Cheshire plain and into North Staffordshire on Monday morning. That's not the sort of regret that can be easily washed away by treating yourself to a Twix on the way home.

To make matters worse, the distraught woman's sister was still in the syndicate. When quizzed as to what she was going to spend her winnings on, she replied "a Vauxhall Corsa".

Steady on, love. Next you'll be going on a shopping spree at Matalan.