A SCOTTISH couple who recently won $AUD68.5 million (£33 million) in the national lottery plan to use the funds to fly their daughter who lives in Australia home for a holiday.

David and Carol Martin, 54, are also now planning to retire after scooping half of Britain’s largest Lotto jackpot.

The couple were shocked to discover they had won after a friend had told them there were two winners.

“My mate Keith had popped over for a chat on Sunday morning when he mentioned that there had been two Lotto winners in the big rollover the night before,” David told The Sun.

“I hadn’t checked my ticket, so I removed it from the mantelpiece and thought I’d take a quick look but for some reason we couldn’t find the results in the paper. After Keith had left, Carol and I were tucking into bacon and black pudding rolls when we decided to check the ticket against the results on her phone.

“I had three lines, all Lucky Dip tickets, and as Carol called out the numbers, I realised that the first line matched up one by one. We must have checked it another ten times or more.”

Chance of lotto win soars

David said they were “stunned into silence”, and kept rechecking the numbers as they assumed there was a mistake.

After ringing to confirm they had a winning ticket, the couple drank “lots of hot tea” to try and make sense of it all.

“The information just wasn’t going in,” David said.

The first person the couple told was their 26-year-old daughter Lisa, who lives in Melbourne.

“She couldn’t believe it and thought we were pulling her leg,” David said.

“We can’t wait to see her again. With all this going on, it doesn’t seem right not to be together.”

The couple plans to buy Lisa a plane ticket to the United Kingdom as they haven’t seen her since Christmas 2014.

Lisa told 3AW that she had just left her Hawthorn gym on Monday morning when she received a phone call from her mum. They never ring at that time so Lisa assumed something bad had happened or someone had died.

But when her mother revealed they had won the lotto, Lisa said: “Shut up! How much?”

Lisa now plans to fly back to Britain over the next few days — “hopefully in the pointy end of the plane”.

The couple have also promised to donate money to help parts of the community affected by flooding.

“It’s everyone’s dream to win the lottery. I’ve talked about winning and what I would do so many times. But now it’s actually here my mind’s gone blank,” David said.

EXCLUSIVE: The Melbourne woman whose parents won $68m in the UK lottery https://t.co/JGSNrDlOYA pic.twitter.com/SRucXgjVuC — 3AW Melbourne (@3AW693) January 13, 2016

“We don’t have all the answers yet but we’d like to help our closest friends and family, and there are charities which are important to us too. Parts of our community have also been hit by flooding and we know lots of people who have struggled in recent times, so there’s a lot for us to work out but it’s a nice problem to have.”

David will also use the funds to pay for a small operation to fix a heart condition called atrial fibrillation.

Carol said he has been taking medication to help control an irregular heart rate, but a surgery will ensure he is “back out on the golf course before too long”.

The other winner — who matched all six winning numbers — has still not come forward to claim the prize.