Anna Wiseman, 36, an intellectual property paralegal, and Myles Robinson, 38, a graphic designer at The Image Works Ltd, were married on June 13, 2015, at St Mary the Virgin, Embsay with Eastby, in North Yorkshire
It is not unusual for teenage boys to dream about girls, but, for Myles, it was a particularly significant experience. At 15, on holiday with his parents in Greece, he had a dream about Anna, who is two years younger and attended the same high school in Barnoldswick, Lancashire. On his return home, he asked her out.
“He was the one that girls fancied,” she says. Yet their relationship ended three weeks later after she mysteriously stomped out of her friend’s house one afternoon, leaving Myles behind. “I was quite shy back then,” she says. Myles, whose parents ran a B&B, went to a local sixth-form college; their paths didn’t cross for another five years when they met by chance at a nightclub in Skipton and chatted.
It was another 15 years before they met again. In that time, Anna had moved to London to work as a mortgage broker, married in Las Vegas, and had two children (Ollie, 11, and Spike, 8). In 2010, she separated from her husband. Myles had studied graphic design at De Montfort University in Leicester and was working as a graphic designer in Lancashire. He had been in a long-term relationship which had ended and was living alone in Barnoldswick.
In 2008, he and Anna reconnected via Facebook. “It was banter with an old school friend,” she says. However, Myles spotted an opportunity when he heard that Anna was single again and living in Darlington. They met in January 2012 when she was staying with her parents in Lancashire. After tea and Battenberg cake at his house, they went to the pub. “We laughed for hours,” he says. They met again a fortnight later, by which time he was certain that he wanted to marry her. “She is worth the wait.”
“He was a good-looking guy with no baggage,” says Anna. “Why would he be interested in me?” She enjoys their “shared history” — his grandfather owned a butcher’s next door to a bakery run by her grandfather in Barnoldswick — and similar sense of humour. “We are both quite stubborn.” Six months into their relationship, she introduced Myles to her sons. In September 2012, they all moved into a rented house in Embsay, a village near Skipton, where Myles now coaches boys at a local football club. “They are brilliant kids,” he says.
In August 2013, Anna gave birth to their daughter, Dottie. Marriage was something they had talked about, yet Anna was taken aback when Myles proposed in December 2013. He had arranged for his mother to look after Dottie to allow them to climb to the top of Embsay Crag, where he proposed on bended knee. He had a ring, a poem that he had written, and drawings by the children of the crag and their family. “We were both crying,” he says. They decided on an informal, local wedding, with a “vintage mash-up” theme.
Last year, Anna graduated from Teesside University with a first-class law degree and £1,000 for winning two academic prizes, which she used to buy her wedding dress from a bridal shop in Skipton. She and her mother made “Reight Bobby-Dazzler Chilli Sauce” for wedding favours. Her grandparents provided the flowers from their garden.
The 3pm ceremony was held at their local church, St Mary’s, where large, pastel-coloured balloons had been tied to the ends of pews. Ollie’s piano teacher played Sigur Rós’Hoppípollaas Dottie ran down the aisle, followed by Anna on the arm of her father and four bridesmaids. Myles’s mother gave a reading. Ollie played John Lennon’s Imagine. “I was in bits,” says Myles.
Eighty guests walked past the newlyweds’ house to the village hall which had been brought to life with vintage furniture and a bar which had been constructed out of pallets by Myles and Anna’s father. It was a sit-down wedding breakfast of chilli and rice, served at four long tables. Anna and her bridesmaids made a selection of cakes. Another 50 guests arrived for the evening celebrations, including the couple’s first dance to Future Islands’ Little Dreamer. Their honeymoon was spent glamping, just the two of them, in a railway carriage in a field in Wales. “It was a little paradise,” says Myles.
