A Change of Lotto numbers before Christmas proved lucky for a Co Cork woman when she won £500,000 in the midweek Lotto draw.
"I've been doing the Lotto faithfully every week since it started, using people's birthdays," said Ms Ann Nicholson (54) from Burgess, east Cork.
"But just before Christmas I changed two of the numbers, 14 and 24, and the new numbers came up trumps for me." Ms Nicholson and her husband, Jim (62), who have four adult children, run the Statoil filling station at Burgess on the Cork-Waterford Road. Ms Nicholson found she had won when her husband handed her the numbers just after the draw.
"I went to check them and I said: `Jim, I've six numbers.' And he said: `Ever the optimist - maybe I took them down wrong.' So I rang our local agent John Coleman and he confirmed them."
Ms Nicholson, who won with a £3 normal play hopes "we'll have a long, happy and healthy retirement though we're not going to retire right away.
"We're going to keep the filling station going for some time yet," she said.