**Welcome to Bride Boggles, our shiny new wedding blog! Lucie Cave, Heat's editor-in-chief, got engaged to Ben Lunt (you may remember him asthe T4 heart throb of 2007) and is ready to take you, dear readers, through her wedding prep process. So let's start at the beginning: the first date...
Considering I got so drunk on our first date I tried to wee through my jeans, it’s quite the achievement that I'm about to get married this year.
Of course I blame my extreme drunkenness on my fiancé Ben and the fact that he’d chosen a 'lovers leap bungee jump' in Windsor as the location for the date. I was convinced that hanging upside down made the alcohol I consumed later that evening go to my head much quicker.
Wee incident aside, that date also forced out a few hard truths early on in our relationship. In order to be able to do the bungee jump we had to declare our ages (I’m nine years older than him) and our weight (again, not something I really wanted to reveal so early on).
Like many folk we met through work. Except in Ben’s case he’d been made Torso of the Week for heat magazine and I’d interviewed him. He was in Channel 4’s reality show Shipwrecked and I was then working as Features Editor for heat – where I’m now Editor in Chief. That was six years ago and that Torso of the week picture is staring at him from the fridge every morning as a reminder to stay away from the cheese in the run up to the wedding in September this year. Oh and he’s a mad Scouser – which might be a necessary explanation as this blog develops.
By way of a small insight into our relationship, this is what happened when I unwisely left my phone in his company and went to the loo:
![]When we got engaged 18 months ago, the proposal was a total shock and meticulously planned. Ben had covered his tracks so well I didn’t have a monkeys what was happening until we were on the Eurostar to Paris (somehow he’d convinced me we’d got a cheap last minute deal on Groupon). Then we were on the Pont Des Arts bridge (which was bursting with padlocks sealed by romantic gestures – another pretty obvious clue) …and that’s when he asked me.
The most overwhelming part of it all was the fact he’d clearly had the whole thing planned for years. He’d put an origami tiger into a birthday card of mine a year into our relationship and told my very confused face (why was he making origami tigers?) that one day I’d know what it meant. Thank god I didn’t lose it down the back of the sofa because here, on the bridge in Paris, he pulled it out and announced, “I wrote something inside here years ago…and now I want you to open it.”
Inside it read: “will you marry me?”
Naturally I jumped up and down like a fool for a few minutes, shrieked ‘yessss!’ then he took me to the other side of the bridge where there was a vintage Porsche waiting to whisk us off. Unfortunately Ben had too many points on his license to be able to hire the car himself so he had to pretend he was his identical twin instead, which meant I had to call him ‘Joe’ for several minutes while he signed for the keys (I did wonder how many other times he’d swapped places with his twin brother during our relationship…).
We then stayed the night in a hotel with rooms set in actual caves in Tours (my surname is Cave – clever eh?) and then it was back for a night atthe wonderful Hotel Costes in Paris. We ended the weekend buying a padlock and scribbling our names and the date on it and locking it to the Pont Des Arts bridge along with thousands of other peoples lovely memories. (Sadly, if you’re planning on getting proposed to with a padlock you’d better hurry up because there are some bah-humbugs around who have decided it’s a menace and want toban ‘love locks’ all together).
Only rather than choosing a classy gold lock we opted for a slightly less sexy looking pink pig [above left]. It'll make it easier to spot when we next visit.
Stay tuned to* Grazia Daily*for Lucie's latest bridal boggles and follow her on Twitter here >>