Engagement Bliss

Spoke to one of the last people - my beautiful, face of an angel friend Allison from Middlesborough - about the bad news last night. She was shocked and upset, but I said that we were planning to come up and visit in between my radiotherapy sessions in the summer, some time in August, when also visiting Jenny and Derek, surrogate parents in York.

But I do feel absolutely marvellous (apart from some pain). Had the best evening ever with Phil on Tuesday, if married life is even 20% as good as that I'll be happy. Utterly spoilt. Never had so much chocolate in the house ever. It's all Green and Black too apart from some incredibly expensive French stuff from our gay French neighbour, Fabrice. Had a full house of about five guests on Wednesday night when my brother Joe came down from Leeds. Phil was working and GG from work came over. My best mate Paolo from Italy had also popped round and helped with some odd jobs like putting the washing out. We all sat outside drinking some rather excellent red wine. Malcolm, a musician mate of Joe's also turned up and we were playing Neil Young with Paolo saying 'I used to listen to this twenty years ago and not understand the words', and other such intellectual, fascinating nuggets. He got talking to GG which was quite good as both can talk for England/Italy so keeping them both going together was quite a neat trick. One of my ambitions is to write a character profile of Paolo. He is so funny that he needs to be written about he is so uniquely boring, predictable yet hilarious, Italian, beautiful-life-esque as to be unbelieveable and some of the scrapes we've got up to need documenting. You can tell Malcolm and Joe are also getting slightly more successful as they spent the entire evening shouting on their mobile phones trying to get bass players to different gigs. Malcolm was saying that he was fed up of World tours as they are 'boring'. Both Joe and Malcolm are currently riding on the back of the successful Corrine Bailey Rae, claiming that 'pop' is dead simultaneously.

The ideal thing about writing a character assasination of Paolo is 1) He is IT illiterate 2) He knows I don't mean it 3) It won't ruin my career 4) It will be funny yet correct

GG promised not to talk about work or the NHS until I return to work and instead got me a lovely card, more chocolate, a Philip Pullman book (socialist) plus Thelma and Louise DVD. I asked her for funny photos of staffside/unison people to put in my Rainy Day box. That's the thing about socialists - they need their sense of humour injection from the anarchists.

Then on Thursday we went to Cambridge to visit the beautiful baby Zia, daughter of our best man Joel and his wife Zoe. She is only six weeks old and virtually (although possibly not quite) as pampered as I am at the moment. I gave Joel a hard time saying that the one thing people remember about a wedding is whether the best man's speech is funny or not. He said he wasn't a stand up comedian. I said he'd better start practising. Phil is more concerned about the stag do. Phil was very dismissive of the present I had got Zia - a folio society hard back edition of 'Anne of Green Gables' with an introduction by Margaret Atwood. But it went down a storm, as of course it was Mummy's favourite book (which she had disclosed whilst pregnant, admitting crying whilst watching the video). The other link which I hadn't realised is the Canadian link (LM Montgomery Canadian and Zoe spent some years there) so it was even better and something that can be kept for generations. We ended up spending the night in Cambridge - in the wonderful camper-van which is still code-word for Anna&Phil special time 'Camper-van time' as we had such an amazing holiday in J&Z's campervan a year ago.