I proposed to my girlfriend through The i Paper crossword – this is how

One Sunday morning, Claire Baker was having an unusually successful time with the crossword in iweekend. It was the August bank holiday and she and her boyfriend, Chris Roberts, both long-time readers of The i Paper from Cardiff, had come away for a spa break in Nantwich, Cheshire. What Baker didn’t know was that this Jumbo General Knowledge Crossword, printed across the country, was in fact a marriage proposal that Chris had spent months secretly plotting with The i Paper and its puzzle setter. Answer after answer came peculiarly easily to Claire: the name of one of her favourite songs (Elvis Presley’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love with You”); her profession (occupational therapy); one of her favourite films (The Jungle Book); even Cinderford, the small Gloucestershire town where she had grown up. In fact, it was all so coincidental that she turned to Chris and said: “We should keep this paper.” Claire had no idea quite how right she was – but was still yet to realise why. Chris and Claire had first met eight years earlier on a night out at Cardiff University Students’ Union, where they “got chatting and never stopped chatting since”. After they moved in together in 2021, Chris, a doctor, began sharing with his partner his love of puzzles as a way to unwind. “I grew up with parents who loved puzzles,” he says. “They were always doing the crossword, and over time I got into doing it with them. So when I started buying the paper – I’ve been reading The i Paper since I was 18 or 19 – turning to the puzzles just became a habit.” Shorts When he and Claire first started living together, he would do the crossword himself and shout out any clues he thought she might know. Soon, however, she was drawn in, and it became a regular part of the couple’s weekend routine. So when, earlier this summer, Chris decided that this would be the year he proposed, it was perhaps inevitable that a crossword would find its way into the plan. “I’d been planning to propose for quite some time, and wanted it to be a little bit different,” he says. “One of our first dates had involved breakfast in bed, so I thought that would be a nice way of doing it. And then I began thinking: what do we enjoy doing together? A crossword was one of them, which led me to this crazy idea of somehow using it to propose.” He found an email address for The i Paper online and in July sent off what he admits was a fairly optimistic request. “I thought: ‘I’m never even going to get a response to this,’” he says. “I almost forgot about it.” But a reply arrived a few days later, from our managing editor Will Gore. Unbeknownst to Chris, his unusual request had already caused a stir in The i Paper offices, where the idea was greeted with enthusiasm – not least by editor-in-chief Oliver Duff, who was particularly keen to make it happen. And thus, the wheels were set in motion. In an email he had never expected to send – and on the understanding it would very much be a one-off – Will introduced Chris to Mike Hutchinson, the puzzle setter behind The i Paper’s Jumbo General Knowledge Crossword. For Hutchinson, it was a first. “I’ve been setting puzzles for 40 years and I haven’t been asked to do anything like this before,” he says. “But it seemed a great idea, particularly as they seem to love our puzzles.” Chris’s request was simple enough to express: he wanted the answers in the crossword somehow to spell out: “Claire, will you marry Chris?” “That was a challenge,” Hutchinson says. “I wanted to get it all along the top line, but that meant increasing the number of squares in the grid. The names wouldn’t be a problem if linked with surnames – in the end [Claire] Danes and [Chris] Evans – and ‘Will You’ was fine as I knew a Hazel O’Connor single. ‘Marry’ was more of a problem, until I found a Lady Gaga single called ‘Marry the Night’.” Hutchinson then decided to “gild the lily”, asking Chris for biographical details and significant songs, films and places that he could sprinkle through other clues in the crossword. There was 63 Across, for instance: “The administrative centre of Shropshire (10)”. The answer, Shrewsbury, was where the couple went on their first official date. All the clues which were relevant to Chris and Claire’s lives, snuck in by Hutchinson 44 Down, meanwhile – “The second largest city in Poland (6)” – was Krakow, where they had taken their first holiday together. But Hutchinson did not stop there, also sneaking in references elsewhere in that day’s puzzles. Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed the romantic theme: the Concise Crossword carried successive clues for “Marriage” and “Proposal”, while the first clue in the Five-Clue Cryptic was: “In position to propose around noon on weekend (4,2,3,4).” The answer, of course, was “Down on one knee”. “Then it was just a matter of waiting,” Hutchinson says. “I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall as they solved the crossword and the significant answers were revealed.” All Chris had to do was get Claire to solve them. The day before the proposal, Chris bought five copies of iweekend and hid them in the boot of the car. The next morning, having driven from Cardiff to the spa hotel, he brought one into their room without Claire noticing. “I hadn’t been nervous in the lead-up to proposing – until that Sunday morning,” he tells us. “Then I started worrying: ‘What if she doesn’t get the clues? What if she doesn’t like it?’” They ordered breakfast in bed and Chris produced the newspaper. There was just one problem: she was more interested in The New York Times’ Spelling Bee. “I was doing my usual thing of reading out clues,” says Chris. “But she was quite distracted by this other game.” Eventually, he managed to coax her into giving the crossword her full attention. “I had to say: ‘Can we do this crossword together?’ But it took a few times of asking until she finally put down Spelling Bee,” he laughs. If his insistence raised any suspicion, it still took a while for Claire to twig that anything was afoot with the puzzle. “It wasn’t until we had filled out around six or seven clues that I realised something was going on,” she says. It was 40 Across – “Gloucestershire town on the eastern fringe of the Forest of Dean that was the birthplace of Jimmy Young (10)” – that did it. “The name of my hometown, which is so small, was particularly suspicious.” By then, they had filled in the answers CLAIRE, WILL YOU and CHRIS. There was still one frustrating gap in the message: MARRY. The clue hinged on a pop song. Split over 9 and 15 Across, it read: “Lady Gaga single from the album Born This Way that she performed on The X Factor in 2011 (5,3,5).” “I just couldn’t get it,” Claire says. “All I could think of was ‘Poker Face’, and obviously that wouldn’t have fit.” Other romantic clues were sprinkled into the day’s puzzles Eventually, Chris stepped in and filled in the answer himself. He then got down on one knee, produced the ring and asked the question that was now sitting completed in the crossword in front of her. Claire very happily said yes. For Claire, one of the biggest surprises was not simply the proposal, but discovering the scale of what Chris had managed to arrange. “I assumed that this crossword was a one-off that he had somehow put inside the newspaper,” she says. “When he said: ‘Oh no, it’s printed across the country,’ I couldn’t believe it.” She soon had proof. Chris had told a small group of relatives and friends what was planned, including her parents and her brother and sister-in-law, who had bought copies themselves. Afterwards, photographs of their completed puzzles began arriving on the couple’s phones. A relieved Chris tells us it all went “better than I could have imagined”, while Hutchinson says: “I was very glad to play a part in helping to make two people happy” – a sentiment shared by the entire team at The i Paper. The newly engaged couple celebrated with a “perfect” day: a walk around the hotel gardens, calls to friends and family, and an afternoon in the spa, where Chris had booked massages, followed by dinner. Celebrations are now continuing on a trip to Athens. As for wedding plans, they have tentatively discussed autumn 2027. One thing, however, has already been settled. The crossword will not end up, as it usually does, in the recycling. Rather, Claire’s initial instincts were right. “We are going to frame it and hang it on the wall of our bedroom, so we see it every day and remember.” Find this week’s Jumbo General Knowledge Crossword in the pullout Puzzles section of iweekend (without, to our knowledge, any secret messages contained within)