A stunned grandfather thought his phone had a glitch when the National Lottery app on it showed that he had won big.
He turned off the phone and turned it on and once more saw the message. This helped Len Parsons realized that it was quite real.
The win
The 66-year old realized that he had won a whopping £500,000, but his wife, Hazel, refused to believe him initially.
Hailing from Rochester, Parsons has been playing the lottery for quite some time, but it wasn’t until the drawing on December 16th that his numbers were finally drawn.
He explained that he had gone to get some instant coffee and decided to pop into the Co-op in City Way.
Since he was there, he thought to get a few Lucky Dip tickets for the Thunderball drawing that had been scheduled for the same night.
The winner said that he had put the tickets in his wallet and had not thought about them until the evening when he checked them on the National Lottery App.
When he scanned his ticket, rather than getting the usual message, he saw the amount of £500,000 on the screen.
The reaction
Initially, he had assumed that something was wrong with his phone, so he exited the app and gave it another try, but the results were the same.
This left him confused, so he decided to go to the website to check the numbers and he also confirmed them with his Thunderball ticket.
He finally realized that there was nothing wrong and he had actually won a half a million pounds. He immediately decided to share the news with Hazel, his 46-year old wife.
She had been sleeping at the time, unaware of the life-changing events taking place and he slapped her shoulder to wake her up.
The wife
Hazel said that when Len buys tickets, he often goes to sleep saying that he would be rich when he wakes up.
Therefore, when he did wake her up with the news, she refused to believe him initially and thought it was just a couple of pounds.
She said that they had checked the ticket numbers again and realized that it was definitely not just a few pounds.
She said that her husband had always joked about becoming a lottery winner and it had finally happened.
The lottery winner now wants to retire from his position in the catering business and focus on the biggest passions in his life i.e. pythons.
He said that they had worked hard their entire lives and he had even done three jobs when his children were younger.
He said that his wife was happy to continue with her job, but he wanted to retire. He also said that they had renovation plans that would keep him busy.
But, he said that he would spend time with his pythons’ collection and he had gotten his love for snakes because he had grown up in outback Australia.
