Feeling lucky?

I'm contemplating what might happen if I won a major prize in a lottery draw in the next week or so. Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, it's £2 million GBP. At the moment, that's about USD 3.5 million or about EUR 1 million.

The first worry is, would the prize fund be able to send the money to me? After that, would I be able to get the money out of my bank in time to spread around the risk? But thinking about that makes me realise that in the UK there are only eight banks I could safely deposit my money in, and that the maximum guarantee is £50,000 per bank holding company. So that rules out one of RBS and NatWest.

So I'd probably need to find a few European banks that I could open accounts with and slosh some money over to them. Perhaps an Irish bank would be alright as they're fully covered for the next two years.

Then what? I'm sitting long cash when the world's banking system is going to the dogs. Perhaps I could just withdraw £1,000 per day from each of these accounts and stuff it in a safe spot in the house. After all, no one would know it's there.

If I've done all of this, I'll have plenty of money and it won't run out. But what happens if the banking system breaks down completely? What use will there be for money? Will it be possible to take these crisply printed pieces of paper with their sophisticated fraud prevention and use them for anything?

What if the financially worst happens? We'll still be here the day after but will it be like those Armageddon films of the 80's like Mad Max where the world goes to pot and it's everyone for themselves?

This keeps me up at night. I think I'll build a chicken coup in the backyard.