A CARNFORTH romantic has used the announcement pages of The Westmorland Gazette to pop the question to his pregnant partner.

Dr Andrew Harding, a 31-year-old research associate at Lancaster University, did not want to ask Dr Alison Parish the big question in a traditional way.

"I suppose it was quite time pressured," he said. "I thought it would be good to do it before she gave birth. I thought that going out for dinner or going to the beach was a bit boring and in one of my favourite TV shows, The Office, there's reference to a proposal done in the newspaper. So I thought why not give it a go?"

He added that another factor was that he did not have the best knees, so kneeling down was not an option.

And although putting the message into the April 5 edition of The Westmorland Gazette was not a problem, keeping it a secret until his partner saw page 58 of the paper proved to be more difficult.

"My plan was to bring up the newspaper with breakfast in bed with some non-alcoholic champagne and strawberries," he said. "But my plan changed quite quickly because she received a flurry of text messages in the morning saying she needed to go and buy a newspaper and she put two and two together."

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Instead, the couple went to Booths for a cup of tea, bought a copy of the newspaper and Dr Harding showed 38-year-old Dr Parish the special announcement.

It read: "Dr Harding would like to ask Dr Parish if she would be his context, mechanism & outcome - i.e. will you marry me?"

"She was very pleased," he said. "She was quite surprised that I'd done it in a newspaper because I generally am quite a private person so she was surprised by how it was done but not necessarily that I was doing it."

The couple first met at a research training course in London and the wording of the announcement related to that course.

Dr Parish is 38-weeks pregnant and about to give birth 'any day' so it is likely that the wedding itself will be a way off yet.