I’ve been having a busy time recently. I finished the draft of my standalone novel in May, then launched into a month of wedding planning. Having claimed for years that if I ever got married, I would elope I ended up with three weddings. Ned and I had our legal marriage on a Friday, then our ring ceremony on a wonderful farm in Sussex on the Saturday, then the following week we had a party in my home town, Darlington, for all our friends and family up North. It was all wonderful. I missed my aunt though, a wonderful woman who died just a fortnight before our celebrations began. She was much in our thoughts. My grandmother also passed away the previous month at the age of 103. I don’t normally write about the personal here, but I owe some explanation for the long silence.

Ned and I managed the wedding at Sussex ourselves and were very touched by the huge amount of work our friends put in to make the day such a success, from our friends who sang and read for us at the ceremony, and conducted it, to the wonderful flowers, to the wine buying trip to France, to the friends who persuaded me into various frocks for the occasion and travelled from far and wide to join us. Then of course there was our family who we kept busy hanging bunting, making salads and shifting huge quantities of wine about the place. We feel very blessed.