Jayne Dowle: Good luck to Justine and Nigel, but is £56m morally right?

At the press conference, they could barely get their words out for excitement. And you can't blame them really, can you? But surely there is something not quite morally right about two people winning all those millions of pounds? It might be a clich, but it will totally change their lives.

Mr Page, from Gloucestershire, who works in property maintenance and describes himself as a "white van man", his partner, who works in an estate agent's, and their three children, will have a brand new

lifestyle, and all the shifts in values and expectations that come with this. I only hope they will be able to handle it, and won't find their brand new world disintegrating, as so many big Lottery winners have done before them.

But why does it have to be quite so much money in one hit? I know the headline figure is good publicity for Euro Millions, but surely it would make a lot more people a lot happier if the prize money was split into smaller amounts and shared around a bit. I mean, who really needs much more than 10m to do all the things they ever wanted to do, buy a big house, and have the mother of all shopping sprees?

My mother's modest ambition, should she ever be lucky enough to win anything, is to walk into Next and kit out both her grand-daughters with everything they desire. Even she – and her shopaholic grand-daughters – would find it difficult to spend 56m in there.

Seriously, I do worry that this huge win will give false hope to the millions of people who treat lotteries, scratch-cards and all the rest as a kind of default pension plan. This includes my own husband, who has put 5 on the National Lottery every week since it started in 1994. Needless to say, he has never won more than 100, so his pension pot hasn't got much larger.

I am so careful – my husband prefers to call it tight – with my own money, I rarely even risk losing a pound on the occasional lucky dip. In fact, I'm not entirely sure how you go about buying a lottery ticket. I panic if he asks me to renew his weekly draw in case I do something wrong and jeopardise the big win he has been anticipating for 16 years.

I just haven't got patience with it all. I also haven't got patience with standing in a queue in the corner shop to pay for milk while somebody parts with a significant amount of cash on a mind-boggling variety of dream tickets. I stood behind one woman the other day, who handed over almost 20 for a handful, plus a four-pack of Special Brew, no doubt to deaden the pain when none of them came up trumps.

She isn't the only one. Whether it is scratch-cards in the corner-shop, or playing for high stakes at online casinos, it is a truth rarely acknowledged that the British are becoming addicted to gambling. Recent figures from Gamblers' Anonymous suggest that at least 600,000 Britons can't live without it.

The really sad thing is that many of these people will be those already handed the worst deck of cards in life. The prospect of a big win is the only thing that keeps them going as they bumble along on benefits, counting out every penny, but always keeping some behind for one last scratch-card.

It is said that you can measure the fortunes of a town by the number of betting shops which open up on its high street. The more there are, the more potential customers there will be, willing to risk everything on a horse race or a football game. Is there a sadder sight on a wet weekday afternoon than a betting shop full of desperate punters, especially when it is the busiest shop in town?

We hear so many dire warnings from the Government about the dangers of alcohol addiction. But barely a squeak is heard about the growing problem of gambling addiction.

Far be it from me to encourage the do-gooders to find yet another drum to bang, but if we seriously want to examine the reasons why Britain is "broken" then we can't afford to ignore it. A "flutter" is one thing, a life predicated on the prospect of escaping poverty through spending all your money on gambling quite another.

The dangers of gambling go beyond the dereliction an addict can cause in a family. The idea that an ordinary life can be transformed in one second by a huge injection of cash is totally symptomatic of the quick-results, no-effort culture which characterises our society. But it is a dream which can rapidly turn into a nightmare, as Ms Laycock and Mr Page might yet find out to their cost.