'Buy as many Rollers as you want... but they won't make you happy'

Ron Ullah has a word of expert advice for husband and wife Colin and Chris Weir, Britain’s £161million EuroMillions Lottery winners — but first he must finish the delicate task of aligning the portholes of the Starship Enterprise.

‘The trouble is,’ says Ron, paintbrush hovering over his painstaking birthday cake creation, ‘there are only so many holidays you can take before it gets a bit samey. Blow a few million, by all means, but there will come a point when it all seems too easy.

‘Once you’ve seen the sunrise over the beach at Cyprus a couple of hundred times, it starts to feel a bit mundane.’
Simple life: Lottery winner Ron Ullah is happiest when at work in his cake shop

Simple life: Lottery winner Ron Ullah is happiest when at work in his cake shop

Ron speaks from experience. In October 2002, he scooped £5,177,425 on the Lottery and believed he’d been handed a golden key to paradise.

He was 57, had grafted since he left school at 15 and anticipated a long and much deserved retirement shuttling between homes in Florida, Cyprus and Essex. There were also his yachts and the Rolex on his wrist glinting in the sun.

So why, nine years on, is he once again back at work — running a successful cake-making business and working 12-hour days?
His daily commute from Wickford in Essex to his shop in Suffolk is a 100-mile round-trip. The Rolex is still on his wrist and there’s a sizeable diamond crucifix round his neck — but the rest of his outfit is distinctly High Street.

To be honest, he looks as if a holiday is exactly what he needs.

The answer is that Ron really loves creating cakes. The window of Carousel, his shop in Ipswich, is filled with gorgeous examples of his sugar-paste artistry.

Prime among them is a tiered jungle complete with waterfall and twining creepers — with every gorilla peeping from between individual leaves shaped by hand. The Starship Enterprise has been ordered for a little boy’s birthday.

But having invested wisely, Ron doesn’t have to labour for hours over marzipan for the cash — which, by the way, is coming along very nicely, thanks to some clever investments. He does it because he was bored simply by being rich.

Having ticked off the essentials on his fantasy shopping list, Ron looked round at his £155,000 Rolls-Royce Silver Seraph, his £1 million house, his en-suite bathrooms, the horses grazing in the paddock, the lake at the bottom of the lawns, and realised that life was empty without a job.

‘One thing you can’t buy is a sense of purpose,’ he says, perched on a stool in Carousel’s caramel-scented kitchen. ‘I’m very hands-on by nature and there I was, with everything my heart desired — except a goal to aim for.

‘If you’ve strived all your life and then, suddenly, what you were striving for is handed to you on a plate . . . it’s weird. It feels fantastic, yet at the same time there’s something missing.

‘When you first realise you’ve got all that money, you’re hit by about 100 emotions. I went cold — I still go cold thinking about  it — then I was euphoric, but then immediately this dark cloud of anxiety came over me and I started to worry.

‘You try to be rational, but you can’t be when you’ve suddenly got £5 million in your account. And I went a bit silly.’