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Enter the realm of millionaires

How they won and how their lives have changed - the National Lottery's jackpot winners tell it all.

Gareth and Caroline holding an oversized cheque

A couple from Mansfield have won a massive £40,627,241 EuroMillions jackpot from the draw on Friday 20th January 2012 — and put their impressive stroke of luck down to not wanting to get wet on a rainy day!

Self-employed builder Gareth Bull bought his ticket on a whim when he couldn't start a building job because of the weather. As he didn't want to get rained on, he drove with the lads in his work van to a shop he'd never been in before and, as fate would have it, bought one Lucky Dip® ticket.

Gareth checked his EuroMillions ticket as usual on TV on the morning of Saturday 21st January. He knew he had the two Lucky Star numbers as they immediately jumped out from the screen, but it very quickly dawned on him that he had more numbers than he originally thought. His wife Catherine said: "He came into the bedroom as white as a sheet, the ticket was shaking in his hand and I knew that something wasn't right. When he tried to explain that he thought we'd won, I thought he was pulling my leg. I was in the middle of straightening my hair and told him I wasn't very happy with being teased!"

"He was so convincing that I went to check myself. Even though it was on TV I still didn't believe that we had all the numbers, so I looked online which showed me the same set of numbers. My head was in bits and I thought from the numbers matched we had won £4k, then I thought it was £40k — but the zeros and commas were all in the wrong place and we couldn't work it out! At one point we thought it was as much as £4 million but we couldn't see straight and it didn't seem real.

"We told our two sons to get ready for their football match and pretended that Gareth was 'calling a client' while we called Camelot. When they confirmed the winning ticket was worth over £40 million, we agreed right then and there that we had to put the win to the back of our minds for the weekend — we had to take the children to Saturday football, had a kids sleepover at ours and had friends coming round in the evening. So we went about our planned family stuff that day and both went to separate venues, all the time knowing that we were multi-millionaires!"

They had agreed not to speak about it in public, but they could call each other on their mobiles, as long as no one else could hear, just to scream excitement down the phone at each other, until they had time to think about what had just happened and celebrate.

Gareth added: "All of this has happened at a crazy fast speed since Saturday and it is hard to keep up! We have our dream home which we built from scratch and it is impossible to think about what we are going to do next yet. We have only told a few people so far so it will be exciting to sit down together as a family and work out plans for the future."

Top of the shopping list for Gareth is a box at his beloved Manchester United, followed by a Range Rover Sport, a villa somewhere abroad and a trip to Disney, Florida for the children. Catherine, who works in health insurance, has admitted that she won't be changing her routine that quickly: "I've never been much of a shopper. I already have home food delivery from Tesco and I'm not going to change that in a hurry. Although, I would like a new upstairs landing carpet and I'd like to get my hair done more than twice a year!" The first thing they've bought with the winnings is an iPad which they had been saving up for, but haven't yet had chance to switch on.