It’s Marina and Mark’s brilliant sense of humour that hits me as we chat – they’re both fun and bubbly, and it’s easy to see that their relationship has been built, in part, on their ability to laugh together.

The couple had been together for three years when they decided to get married in 1980. They were very young at the time – Mark was 23 and Marina was 21, but they already knew that they wanted to build a life together.

“I was studying in the UK back then, so only had holidays to spend in Malta,” Mark explains. “We knew we wouldn’t be able to live in Malta, so Marina moved to the UK and stayed with friends until we were married.”

Mark still recalls asking for his bride’s hand in marriage. “I was so nervous,” he smiles. “I was visiting for the Christmas holidays and only had a small window in which to ask Marina’s father for permission… and it was getting smaller and smaller! Before I knew it, it was my last evening here and I had to get on with it. I knew her dad was in a meeting in his study before we all went for dinner, so my plan was to rush in there after he was done, hoping it would all turn out beautifully – like it does in the movies! As it turned out, by the time I got there he had already left the study and I could hear him fixing a drink in the kitchen – so I rushed in there and just blurted out that I wanted to marry his daughter. Although it was a little slapdash, he was thrilled and, being of the Sicilian persuasion, a little emotional. Thankfully he said yes! The rest, as they say, is history.”

As Marina and Mark were living separately in the UK in the run-up to their wedding, preparations back home went ahead without them. “My mother handled everything,” says Marina. “She went to Messina in Sicily to choose my wedding dress, and also organised the bridesmaids’ dresses for my little cousins. I trusted her completely because she has such good taste and, predictably, everything turned out perfectly.”

When Marina did return, there were three weeks to go until the big day, and lots of loose ends to tie up. “Everything was done in a bit of a hurry – to the point that some people actually thought it was a shot-gun wedding,” she grins. “It wasn’t! We just needed to get back to the UK as my permit had run out, and I needed to be Mark’s wife to get back into the country to keep working.”

The day itself went beautifully. Marina remembers walking down the road from her Ta’ Xbiex home to the church nearby, where the couple exchanged vows. The reception was held in the gardens of the Grand Hotel Verdala. “It was very pretty and beautifully lit,” Marina recalls. “It wasn’t a big wedding – with maybe 300 guests or so – so it was lovely to chat to everyone as we tried to take it all in.”

They then went straight off on their honeymoon – three days in Gozo. “I’d just graduated so I didn’t have the funds for anything else!” Mark quips. “The wedding wrapped up at about midnight and we left in our ‘going away’ car which had been suitably decorated. Then, once round the corner, we hopped into a taxi which took us to the Gozo ferry for three days at the Ta’ Cenc, before we went back to the UK to start our lives together properly.”

Looking back, both Marina and Mark say they pretty much grew up together. “We’ve had lots of ups and downs, from the challenges of being in the UK and a number of health scares, to the births of our three wonderful children. We were so young when we got married and both quite immature, but we found our way as a pair and stayed together very happily.”