SCOTLAND:After treating herself to a new dress and her first manicure, the UK's biggest lottery winner was yesterday getting used to the reality of her £35.4 million (€52.4 million) win.
The addition to her bank account will in future pay her more in interest each week than she has previously earned in a year at the Royal Mail's East Kilbride, Scotland, sorting office.
Angela Kelly, a 40-year-old single mother, separated from her husband, living in a flat with her 14-year-old son, appeared blinking into a new world of wealth, full of modest ambitions and endearingly overawed by the knowledge she is now worth more than Wayne Rooney and princes William and Harry.
But Ms Kelly kept her feet firmly on the ground. Even as journalists calculated what £35 million would notionally buy her: five Lear jets, Britain's ninth most expensive home, an Andy Warhol original, or the world's most expensive goalkeeper (Italy's Gianluigi Buffon would leave her about a million in change).
No spend, spend, spend for her; no limo, she's got her eye on a top-of-the-range Seat Ibiza to replace the car written off in an accident earlier this year, and a move to a house locally. She said she would upgrade the tickets she'd already bought for a trip to visit relatives in Canada. There may also now be a trip to Hawaii.
"Inside I am churning up really. I am not that calm . . . It is so weird - really, really weird because a £21,000 salary is not a bad wage . . . I just cannot get my head around it all," she told a press conference at the sort of hotel in which she may now get used to staying.
"I don't really worry about money. If I have it, I spend it."
In the carefully managed conference at which she was asked questions by GMTV's Fiona Phillips, Ms Kelly related that she had not even bothered to check the numbers until she went into work on Monday morning. She pulled the ticket from her handbag when she learned that the jackpot had not been claimed: "I couldn't believe it when the numbers were there in a row."
She asked her colleagues to double-check them for her: "I couldn't even say anything. I just pushed my chair back and put my head between my knees, I was so flabbergasted."
Her son John has compiled a list of his priorities. She has already bought him a PlayStation 3 and there is a Nintendo Wii in the pipeline but he may have to wait a little longer for a quad bike: "That's not definite . . . maybe when he's older." Ms Kelly said she had initially refused to tell John how much she had won.
"My son called work to find out what time I would finish. I said to him: 'I will speak to you tonight, I have had a wee win on the lottery.' But he phoned me back within 10 minutes and asked me how much it was." When she told him "there was just an intake of breath".
John, she insisted, would remain at his current school, and when he left could pursue his ambition to be a fireman.
Her former husband, Gerry, from whom she separated eight years ago and who works in the same sorting office, had offered his congratulations, she said.
They remain on good terms, have not divorced and he was said to be "over the moon".
Asked whether he could lay claim to a share of the money, she said she would be happy to give him some: "I haven't even thought about that . . . I think he'll leave that up to me."