MARY JONES could be in line for a corporate hug from the Bank of England - for she must be just the sort of role-model the Grand Old Lady would like the rest of us to follow.

When 62-year-old Mary hit the jackpot, with a '9.3m lottery win five months ago, she said it wouldn't change her life.

And she's stuck to her word.

For Mary, who has kept her jobs cleaning the loos at an outdoor education centre and selling tickets and ice-cream at a local cinema, loves her life the way it is.

And, apart from a modest outlay on improvements for her North Wales home and cars for herself and four children, she has been more prone to save than spend.

Which makes her a bit of a rarity in shopaholic Britain today, where personal debt has hit an unimaginable '1 trillion and the interest paid on that debt is a mind-blowing '6bn every month.

So knowing there are still some prudent folk around must be a bit of a relief to the BoE which has dished out a stern slap on the wrist to the rest of the nation with another interest rate rise, in the hope of curbing our communal spending.

We Brits, it seems, have more in common with Sixties pools winner Viv Nicholson, who etched the "spend spend spend" phrase into the national lexicon, when she famously promised to do just that after scooping what, at the time, was a fabulous fortune, of '152,000

She did too - getting through today's equivalent of a multi-million pound win - in around four years.

Big spender

Now apparently almost everyone is a big spender - with borrowed money. Household debt, which includes mortgages, credit cards and personal loans, is now equivalent to '17,000 for every man, woman and child in the UK - prompting brake action from the BoE.

After all, as Charles Dickens's Mr Micawber said - debt is misery.

And in the long term, borrowing too much could be just that - not just for the individual, but for the country.

Mary Jones is still working - because she wants to - as do thousands of other older workers - but soon working longer may be a matter of necessity, not choice.

Human resources consultancy Aon has warned that the government may be forced to increase the state retirement age to 70 because a shrinking working population means it won't be able to afford to pay state benefits.

So there's the happy prospect of not only working till you drop to pay off your own debts - but to help out fellow spendthrifts too! Tweet