Congratulations to Hannah and Dave and Marina and Shaun who are the winners of our Free on the day management competition.
Due to the overwhelming response, the judges decided to split the entries into weddings happening this year and weddings happening next year. The judges loved the element of surprise in Hannah's story.
Marina and Shaun's story will be blogged next week.
Hannah and Dave's story
Myself and my partner Dave had been together for 7 years before we got engaged. From when we had been together for about 2 years, I had been hassling him. Every time I got drunk I would ask when he was going to propose, every time a couple who had been together less time than us got engaged I would say 'they've only been together X years, why are they before us?'. Dave would always reply that we would get engaged 'soon', 'in time', or 'sooner than you think', which I always pointed out was clearly not true as otherwise we'd be engaged already!
For a while we lived with his parents. We would often go out for walks in the evenings, and one of the places we would regularly go was Chesterton Windmill. I always loved it there, we were usually the only ones there on an evening and it gave us some important alone time.
At midnight going into New Year's Day of 2009, Dave told me that it would be in that year that we got engaged. I fully expected it to be at every major occasion - Valentine's Day, my birthday, his birthday, but no proposal was forthcoming. A drunken conversation resulted in him promising that we would be engaged by the end of August.
On our 7 year anniversary at the start of August we went to a friend's birthday party, where he announced his engagement to his girlfriend. Another couple engaged before us! I knew that I wouldn't be being proposed to any time soon, as he wouldn't have wanted to steal our friend's thunder.
In mid-August we went on holiday to Bournemouth. Not overly exciting admittedly, but we have been there more times as a couple than anywhere else. I used to go as a child and have always loved it there. Every day, every time we were alone, I thought this is it. But nothing. On the last day we were walking down the beach, no-one was around, and nothing. I gave up. It obviously wasn't going to happen.
When we got back from Bournemouth we were supposed to be going camping for a friend's birthday, but Dave said he wasn't feeling too well so we didn't go. So instead I cleaned the house, and did the ironing, and other such boring jobs. At the end of a busy day of jobs Dave suggested we go for a walk. I suggested somewhere but he said he fancied going to the windmill as we hadn't been for a while.
We got to the windmill and had a slow walk. There were a couple of people there taking photos. It was very rare that anyone else was up there. We stayed for about half an hour then started the walk back to the car. Half way back, Dave stopped me, and started a bit of a speech. He then reached into his pocket and pulled out a small box, and I promptly burst into floods of tears. He's not a man of many words, but he said exactly the right ones. It hadn't even crossed my mind for a second that he would propose on that day, and it was at the perfect place, the place we would go to get a bit of time to ourselves several years before, and still visited if feeling nostalgic.
It turned out that when our friends announced their engagement at the start of August, Dave already had the ring at home (which he picked himself). And he insisted on taking his backpack everywhere we went on holiday (which at the time I didn't think anything of) as he had the ring in the bottom of the bag the whole time, but couldn't find somewhere meaningful enough to propose.
I always thought that I would know exactly when Dave was going to propose. It had felt so inevitable for so long that I thought as soon as he does something a little unusual I would know that was it. But he managed to surprise me, and it was the most romantic thing he's ever done.
