I had been signed up less than a year when I won £1000. We are very careful, very conscious about scams, so when we were having a meal in town and someone phoned up to say we had won, and asked ‘do you want it transferred into the bank account’, my wife said don’t give your bank details, so I said, I'll take a cheque! And they wrote me a cheque and we could see it was real so it was very nice. 

I wouldn't even have remembered I had the lottery because I don't check it and I pay by direct debit. 

I didn’t spend the winnings on a specific item, I just enjoyed it. I can enjoy it and have a connection to Mum so I think oh come on, let’s go out and we'll have a meal on Mum or something. So that's a good connection to Mum.

I'm not sentimental in that sort of respect.  I look at it and think, if she enjoyed the last few months in the Hospice better than she would have done, that's a bonus.

This is the only lottery I do and to be honest, when I bought it I didn't do it for the am I going to win? I do it because it's local, it's just a small amount a month and I'm pleased that I'm doing it because it has a local connection. What I pay per month is probably a fraction of what people would pay on coffees.

At the Hospice I think you need to isolate it from the sadness of why you're there. As soon as she went there, I thought wow. I can vividly remember she didn't know where she was or who she was but when she was there, she was up in bed all done up and chatting to me and my brother and it was a fleeting glimpse of how she used to be, it was lovely. That would be probably the last positive memory of as she was, it was a little burst of how she was 20 years before she died, before she even got ill. 

I'm quite philosophical. She had a happy life. She had a good life. Enjoy. Celebrate. Things move on, you know. The lottery is a nice opportunity to be able to say thank you to St Helena Hospice for what they did for the family and for Mum.  

This story may not be published elsewhere without express permission from St Helena Hospice.