HELEN OAKLEY and Simon Shaw were married on April 30th at the Cliff House Hotel in Ardmore, Co Waterford. The bride, whose father died before she was born, was accompanied down the aisle by her youngest brother Senan Heffernan, to One Day Like Thisby Elbow.
Helen, a physiotherapist, grew up in Tipperary, where she attended St Anne’s Secondary School. She left Ireland at 17 to study at the University of East London. She has two sisters and two brothers and her mother lives near Tipperary. Simon, a chartered tax adviser with KPMG in Manchester, was born in Stockport, Cheshire and his parents, Carole and Chris Shaw, attended the wedding. His sister Andrea and brother Michael were surprise guests, which was organised in cahoots with the bride.
The pair met one Saturday afternoon in Carluccios deli, when they were seated at adjoining tables having afternoon tea. They got talking and quickly discovered a mutual passion for food. “I promised to text Helen a link to the website of my favourite restaurant later that day, which I duly did, and she replied: ‘Is that an invitation to dinner or merely a recommendation?’ Naturally I replied that it was an invitation to dinner. To which she didn’t reply. So I hastily sent another text saying ‘unless of course you do not want to go to dinner, in which case it was merely a recommendation’.” She phoned later “in fits of laughter” and they agreed to go out for dinner.
“We got engaged at The Wolseley in London , although I had intended to propose the evening before while we were having dinner at Nobu, but I decided Helen perhaps had had a cocktail too many to remember if I did! So I waited until the next day to propose at a hastily arranged table at The Wolseley. We collected the engagement ring from Boodles on Helen’s birthday.”
They decided to have a small wedding in Ireland. “We had stayed twice before at the Cliff House, and apart from the location, we love the food.”
The night before the wedding, they ate at Paul Flynn’s Tannery in Dungarvan, and straight after the wedding ceremony they had a champagne toast at the Cliff House and then headed to Aherns in Youghal for lobster and chips. But the main event was a “nine-course spectacular” later that evening produced for their small party by Martjin Kajuiter, head chef at the Cliff House. The wedding cake, made mille feuille-style, was “out of this world”, says Simon.
“We drove to Dublin port for the journey back home and by complete coincidence had to stop at traffic lights in the city centre, outside a bar where about 15 years ago on a weekend trip to Dublin, I had turned to one of my friends and said ‘I’m going to marry an Irish girl’.”
Their honeymoon included three nights in Cape Town at the Cape Grace, an award-winning hotel, four nights on safari at the Ivory Lodge in the Lion Sands Private Game Reserve and then three nights in the Seychelles at the Hilton Hortholme. “We were seated in front of the president of the Seychelles when we flew there from South Africa so we were clearly in good company for the flight.” They live by a river in Lancashire.