"Are you telling me darling, that we've won the jackpot? £100 million?"

"No," she said smiling, "a share of it. Well, £7.40 to be precise. We got two numbers up, and one lucky number."

Her attempt at humour, pretending we'd won a lot of money, I did not find amusing at all. But it did get me thinking of how I would feel to suddenly get very rich. Words like shock, euphoria, astonishment, relief and, would you believe, fear all came to mind.

Years ago, I recall my dad meticulously filling out his Pools coupon every Thursday. His little crosses down the column were neat and precise, always the same numbers (birthdays etc) always filled in with the dream of winning big! I think we once won £46.

Then my mum got hooked on newspaper bingo, although we never won a bean.

Premium Bonds, run by National Savings & Investments, were favoured by my nanna, who bought all her grandchildren £20 worth. Some 23 million people hold them – 40% of the population. Good old Ernie pulls the winners, and creates two millionaires every month apparently, although I've never met anyone who has won.

The National Lottery, one would presume, is a fairly easy way to get rich quick. It has created over 2,100 millionaires, or multi-millionaires, since it launched in 1994. For every £1 spent on tickets, it pays over 50 pence in prizes, and it kind of blew away the pools for punters' weekly flutters.

A few years ago a Cambridge mathematician called Dr Oliver Johnson worked out the odds of a £10 bet winning a million in different forms of gaming.

The lottery came in fourth with odds of a one in 1.4 million chance. The Pools came 3rd with a one in 639,685 chance, while sports betting (bookies) came second with odds of one in 247,596. And the winner? National Bingo, which links hundreds of bingo clubs across the country twice daily. Its odds of making a million are an impressive one in 200,000.

So now for getting revenge on my wife, for kidding me that we'd won. I'm going to Sky Plus this Saturday's Lottery and then buy a ticket with all those numbers on and watch back my recording the following Saturday, while she thinks its live. That should give her a nice shock!