WILL YOU MARRY ME?:
Getting intu romance with proposal
LOVE was in the air at intu Uxbridge shopping centre on Valentine’s Day when Alan Sennett proposed to his girlfriend.
The 25-year-old gave the ultimate Valentine’s gift on Saturday when he got down on bended knee to ask Coral Moore for her hand in marriage in front of cheering shoppers.
It meant the couple had two things to celebrate, as Valentine’s Day also marked their second anniversary as a couple.
The Gazette’s website getwestlondon had teamed up with intu Uxbridge to search for a couple worthy of winning a £1,000 engagement ring competition and proposal.
Mr Sennett, a media teacher at Parkside Studio College in Wood End Green Lane, had been planning to pop the question and when he heard about the competition he decided he had to enter.
He said: “I just knew I really had to do this. I wanted to do something big and I knew I could do something amazing and give Coral a ring I could not afford otherwise.”
The competition asked entrants to write in no more than 100 words why they should win the prize. After countless efforts which he felt just were not good enough, Mr Sennett entered with a poem (published right) which melted the hearts’ of judges and saw him named the winner.
He was told the good news on Wednesday (February 11) and the next day went to Ernest Jones in intu Uxbridge to pick a ring.
“I had four options in front of me, and one had a bluish diamond and it was called Coral Blue, and I thought, because it was her name, that this is the ring for her,” he said.
He then had to come up with a plan to get Miss Moore at the shopping centre for 1pm on Saturday.
He said: “I had to be careful not to let her know and with what I said. I told her we had won second prize and a photo shoot. I needed an excuse to get her there dressed up and on time. She put her hands on her face was absolutely amazed. She fell in love with the ring immediately. She said she loved the fact it had a meaning behind it and that I had put so much effort into it.”
They plan to tie the knot in 2017.