'It was sheer luck I picked up the newspaper' - couple find love thanks to Glasgow Times

Stephen Canning nearly missed it – in fact, he did not often buy the newspaper, and it was purely by chance a sports headline had caught his eye.

“I can’t remember what it was now, a football story, probably – but I was flicking through the pages and spotted the ad looking for a young professional person to flat-share in Crosshill, near Queen’s Park,” he explains.

“It was in a great location and I was training to be a chartered accountant in Glasgow – I’d moved to the city from Ayrshire and was staying with a friend, so it seemed ideal.”

The ad had been placed by Catriona, a young schoolteacher keen to find a flatmate to help her pay the mortgage. Stephen moved in – and the couple will celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary later this year.

Romance is in the air this weekend, as Valentine’s Day approaches.

There is an unusual link between Glasgow and the saint who inspired this annual celebration of love – his bones (or at least, some of them) reside in a Gorbals church….

The story goes that in 1868, a French family donated a wooden box, or ‘reliquary’ to the Franciscan religious order, and sent it to the St Francis Church in the Gorbals for safekeeping.

There it lay, more or less forgotten, until it was moved to the nearby Blessed St John Duns Scotus in 1999. Written on the box are the words ‘Corpus Valentini Martyris’, meaning ‘the body of Saint Valentine’ and the church has become a place of pilgrimage for young lovers…..

According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, by some accounts St. Valentine was either a Roman priest and physician who suffered martyrdom during the persecution of Christians by the emperor Claudius II Gothicus about 270, or the Bishop of Terni, also martyred. Or it could be these are just different versions of the same story, and refer to only one person.

Like almost every love story, there were ups and downs in the unfolding romance of Stephen and Catriona Canning – and it was far from love at first sight.

“I had about eight or nine responses, and me and my friend interviewed them all,” says Catriona. “Stephen was maybe the third or fourth and it wasn’t like there was any chemistry right away.”

She grins: “I remember thinking he was quite sporty, and so might have some nice-looking friends.”

Stephen, entirely unoffended, has clearly heard this story several times over the years. He laughs: “We got on really well, but there was no suggestion of romance at first.”

Catriona cannot pinpoint exactly when she fell in love with Stephen, she says, but once romance started to blossom, things happened very quickly.

“He looked after me,” she says, simply. “I had been very ill, and he cooked for me, and fixed the boiler, and helped me when I had a fever – he was very kind. We also talked a lot, proper conversations about things that mattered and we had a real connection.

“We got engaged three months after I moved in, and were married in the December of that same year.”

After their whirlwind romance, Stephen and Catriona were married on a snowy day in nearby Eastwood House on the south side of the city and honeymooned in Paris during one of the city’s coldest winters on record.

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The couple, who now live in Crosshouse, near Kilmarnock, have three sons – Ross, 29, Rory, 24 and Euan, 21.

“We’ve had a lot of ups and downs in our lives, like every married couple,” says Catriona.

“But in every low point, we have talked about things, and supported each other, and always believed things would pick up.”

Stephen agrees. “It was sheer coincidence that I picked up that Glasgow Evening Times that day, sheer luck that I was looking for a flat at the time…but life is full of moments like that. I’m glad I did.”