It began in turquoise waters off Hapuna Beach in Maui. David Wilman, an employed barrister at SJ Berwin, was splashing around trying to forget his daily City grind when he struck up a conversation with Catie Williams, a glamorous young marketing professional from Canada.
“Just as I was getting out of the water, she told me to look her up on Facebook,” 40-year old Wilman told The Times’ Court and Social pages on Saturday. “She was Catie with a ‘C’ from Saskatchewan. I had no idea how to spell that, so I told her I was David with a ‘D’ from London.”
Now, what does a 25-year old blonde bombshell do with some extremely vague contact details given to her by a pasty Speedo-clad Brit almost twice her age?
That’s right, she rushes back to her hotel, spends the rest of her holiday conducting on exhaustive online search to eliminate all the other Davids in London, then sends Wilman a message in the hope that someday they could get married.
And married they have got – after a period of long-distance relationship fostering, in which the wealthy City lawyer oiled the wheels of romance by sending Williams not a plane ticket to come and see him but, er, a Lonely Planet guide of Europe.
“We started e-mailing back and forth. And I sent her a travel book on Europe,” thrifty Wilman explained to The Times in that irresistible way of his
Bizarrely, Williams’ messages began to become less frequent around this point. But had she forgotten David with a ‘D’? No chance! Having cobbled enough money together to buy a plane ticket herself, the love struck Canadian arrived in London.
“She sent me a text out of the blue asking if I would like to go for supper,” Wilman recalls.
The sparks flew, Catie moved to Britain and the couple were married on October 25 in Maui, overlooking the same spot of ocean where they had first caught sight of each other three years earlier.