A couple who first met on their paper rounds have got married after rekindling their relationship 40 years later.

Mark and Janice Flanagan tied the knot on Thursday, August 18 after meeting through an Enfield history Facebook page, Winchmore Hill and Palmers Green Memories.

Mr Flanagan, 55, said they knew each other as teenagers when they had papers rounds in Palmers Green, at Sweet Inspiration newsagents in Hoppers Road, near Bourne Hill.

After being apart for four decades, fate seemed to have drawn them together again when, after contacting each other through social media, it turned out they both lived near Southampton, about 20 miles apart.

Mr Flanagan, a salesman for a builders’ merchants, first met Janice, a 53-year-old security officer for the Ministry of Defence, in 1974 when he was 14 and she was 12, and says he remembers the first time he spoke to her clearly, even today.

He said: “We got chatting one morning, I’d been building up to it for a while.

“We started going around together, in our group of friends. We would go to the Grange Disco, we once had a kiss there.

“I was always a shy kid, I never asked her out. She now tells me she thought I was too good for her – she said ‘I used to fancy the pants off you’.”

Mr Flanagan, who has been married twice previously and has three children and two grandchildren, left Palmers Green in 1986 with his first wife, after saying they “drifted apart” as they got older, but says “I always wondered what happened to her”.

He was living in Hampshire in 2001 when Janice moved to village a 20 miles away, but never knew they were so close for 15 years. He admits their relationship probably would not have happened if she had not lived so close by.

Then, on April 19, 2015, they made contact for the first time since the 1970s.

Mr Flanagan said: “I joined the page because I’m quite interested in the local history, then I saw Janice was a member.

“I started leaving comments on the page about the photos, then she left one saying ‘I know you, I used to come around your house’. I thought ‘blimey, Janice, after all this time.

“We became friends on Facebook and started chatting. We spoke so much over the week it was ridiculous.

“We met up and it was instant, when I saw her I knew it was her. We hugged, and that was lift off.

“We were both in troubled times, my marriage was gradually fading away, Janice and her then husband were essentially living as brother and sister. For us, it was love straight away.”

They “kept the page updated” on the progress of their relationship, and were married last week. They have a honeymoon planned for Lanzarote in October.

He said: “It was the best day of our lives. I had a lump in my throat, thinking of all those years. We have missed 40 years of each other.

“It was all meant to be, we have come full circle. I am over the moon, it’s quite an incredible feeling, we love each other to bits.

“You do read about these stories, but we never thought it would happen to us.”

Rick Starling, who established the Winchmore Hill and Palmers Green Memories group in 2012, said he never expected his local history group to have such an impact on someone’s life.

He said: “I saw a gentleman had put a post up saying he used to be a paper boy on Hoppers Road about 40 years ago, and knew this girl he had done rounds with. He said he had recently been divorced and had been thinking about her.

“She replied, and it started there. It caught my eye, I thought it was such a nice story.

“This page has rekindled a lot of old memories for people, but nothing like this. I’m quite proud of it, it has got a really good response. Bringing people together is what this page is about, but this is the best yet.”