It’s easy to forget about the mess in your car, whether old receipts, change, or a tangle of charging cables. But a dad in the United Kingdom had something priceless bouncing around in his car for months: a winning lottery ticket.

Darren Burfitt is a father of two, and the greenskeeper at his local golf course. One day, his four-year-old son asked to open a new bag of potato chips. But Burfitt remembered his son had abandoned a half-eaten bag somewhere in his messy Citroën. “I knew there was a packet which he hadn’t finished in the car so I told him I would pop out and get that one for him.”

While searching his car, Burfitt spotted a handful of lottery tickets. He’d bought them on vacation, but admits, “I just hadn’t got round to checking them.”

He said after he found the chips, “I decided to grab my National Lottery tickets at the same time, and started to scan each one on the lottery app on my phone.” He got to work while his son snacked. One of the first tickets was a winner worth nearly five dollars. Burfitt thought that was all the luck he’d have. Then he checked the final ticket.

“One of the tickets was particularly creased so I thought I would leave that one until the end. It was so crumpled it wouldn’t scan, so I had to bring up the draw details and read the results.”

“I couldn’t quite believe it…. In fact, I still cannot believe it now. I just kept looking at the date and then the matching Millionaire Maker code – and then the date and the code again. I just could not comprehend what I was seeing.”

The nearly unreadable old ticket was a EuroMillions winner, worth one million British Pounds ($1,290,000 USD).

An extra-lucky winning lottery ticket

Not only did Burfitt let the winning ticket bounce around his car for months, but he never even locks the vehicle. It could have been swiped at any moment.

“My car is honestly a shed on wheels, held together with mud. It has almost no value, so I never bother to lock it! I dread to think what could have happened to that winning ticket.”

Burfitt’s wife, who is a teaching assistant named Gemma, said of the winnings, “It changes everything and we can finally buy a home of our own. It is going to give us so much security for our future and our children’s future.”

And of course, they’re also getting Darren a new pickup truck to replace his old Citroën car. Hopefully, it’ll be held together by more than mud—and come with doors that lock.