REBECCA FINDLEY takes a look back at 2006, a year that opened with a lottery win for a Stevenage couple while a Letchworth GC charity was selected for a £1.5 million grant by television viewers and The Queen and Duke of Edinburgh visited Mid-Bedfordshire.

REBECCA FINDLEY takes a look back at 2006, a year that opened with a lottery win for a Stevenage couple while a Letchworth GC charity was selected for a £1.5 million grant by television viewers and The Queen and Duke of Edinburgh visited Mid-Bedfordshire. But tragedy also struck when popular paralympian Paul Pearce died after being hit struck by a vehicle while out on a training run.

THE new year got off to a lucky start when Stevenage couple Darren and Gabrielle Nash netted the £15 million Christmas Eve Lotto. The couple were presented with the cash at White Hart Lane, home of Darren's favourite football team Tottenham Hotspur. Amazingly they lived just one street away from Sharon Creighton who had won £8.8m 10 months earlier.

The luck also rubbed off onto Darren's local football team when he went to watch Stevenage Boro beat Cambridge United in a Nationwide Conference game.

* A woman from Sandy was also in the money. Leslie Wilkinson scooped £200,000 playing bingo at Flutters Club in Biggleswade.

* However, one not-so-lucky person had a nasty shock as a peed-off pensioner took matters into his own hands by pouring urine into a van after a parking dispute. Stanley Johnson, 78, was caught on police camera tipping the liquid into the heater vents and main body of Barry Trussell's Transit van parked in Page Close, Baldock.

* Elsewhere in Comet country, enraged communities called upon lovers of the countryside to join them in the campaign against the expansion of Luton Airport. The grim reaper was on site adorning a Luton Airport T-shirt to portray the death and destruction that campaigners feared would happen.