Nurse Alison scoops more than £41,000 in radio competition

But it proved a lucrative phone call for the Belfast woman who works at Musgrave Hospital, as she became the latest winner of the Cool FM & Downtown Cash Call.

Having remembered the number off the top of her head, Alison said those precious words, this week’s lucky number - “£41,031!”

A busy mum-of-three, Alison regularly enters the cash call alongside her daughters, but said: “It’s just as well my daughter didn’t answer, she had it written down wrong as £41,310.”

Alison had just finished work when she received the call telling her she had won.

“I had been on night duty and was about to go to Homebase to get paint. Grace (her daughter) said to me ‘don’t be going yet, the cash call hasn’t come through’. I said to myself, sure I couldn’t win an argument, but I sat down just to message my son and Cool FM phoned. I actually thought it was an automated message,” laughed Alison.

“Work are, of course, short staffed at the moment, and they had been messaging me to see if I could go in, so when it popped up ‘No Caller ID’, I thought ‘here’s work’.”

Alison said her work colleagues were the first people to call her after her big win.

And she said she knew straight away who she was going to spoil with her winnings - her three children.

“We’ll divide the money between the four of us, they deserve it too. We’ll take £10,000 each, I never dreamed I’d be able to give my kids that amount of money. I’ve got two daughters at home, and a son that’s recently married, so that will make a nice little windfall for them.”

Alison has worked tirelessly over the last number of years to support her family, taking on extra shifts each week.

“It would definitely take me a couple of extra shifts to match this, it means an awful lot to us all.”