This comes to you from a sun lounger in Crete (the ostrich approach to unemployment: go on a minibreak!) and since you’re possibly on a come-down after the double bank holiday sugar rush I won’t inflict any smug sun lounger knee ‘n sea shots on you. And if you can’t imagine what a knee ‘n sea shot is then you’ve pruned your Facebook friends wisely.  

Ed and I have told the hotel that we’re on our honeymoon so we get all the free stuff. Everywhere we venture in the building we’re reminded of our fraud by a wall of warm congratulatory smiles and the occasional conspiratory wink. I signed for some drinks at lunchtime with his surname and could practically hear the forces of bad karma stamping on any future hopes of my ever actually getting married.

Best friend Lucy did get married this weekend in Sussex, the day after the royal one. As I was summoned for a wedding rehearsal on Friday afternoon my journey time in the morning was minutely planned out to incorporate a not-too-early get up, train and car journey to parents house and a five minute window for tea-making and sofa settling before the pageantry kicked off. What I hadn’t accounted for was the rogue element of my Dad, who was ten minutes late picking me up and then turned the wrong way out of the train station (the closest idea of what a home counties town would look like if a 28 Days Later-style apocalypse wiped out the entire populace is ten minutes before a televised royal wedding):

Me: Hang on. Why are you driving in the wrong direction?

Dad: I just need to pop to Jewsons. Won’t take long.

Me: But – but we don’t have time! Middleton arrives in eleven minutes?

Dad: I know, but I have to get some Baylor twine, I’m running low

Me: WHAT?!

Dad: Won’t take long

Me: But, but this is history in the making… why are you putting Baylor twine ahead of history in the making?

Dad: The hens need it

Me: This is important!

Dad: So are the hens

Me: So are the hens? SO ARE THE HENS? [starts banging head against window]

As it happens, we made it – just – to see Kate beaming through her veil on the steps of Westminster Abbey. ‘Wonderful service’ sniffed my Dad as the first verse of Jerusalem swelled from the TV, apparently forgetting all about the hens.    

More importantly, I was there for the beginning, middle and end of Lucy’s wedding the following day, when she married Will, who we met when he asked us for the time by Bhagsu waterfall five years ago (he was wearing a watch). I went up to sign the register with her and was so overwhelmed by the momentousness of it all that I temporarily forgot how to use a pen, so it looks like one of her witnesses was an 8-year-old girl. I was an 8 year old girl when our friendship was first forged so perhaps this is touchingly symbolic: ‘please try not to cry’ she’d told me beforehand, only for me to do exactly that when we’d buttoned up her wedding dress and she stood in ivory fishtailed splendor preparing for the short walk to the church – they didn’t bother with a car, since the church is a stone’s throw away, she hitched up her skirt and strode purposely through the village with the tiny bridesmaids trailing along in her wake.

She and hubby are now off on their real honeymoon as Ed and I crack on with the fake one. In lazy holiday tradition I’ve taken to making casual assumptions about our fellow sunbathers. Most of my energy this week has been focused on working out who the German man with two wives is, or is that a wife and an over-familiar nanny? Or a wife and an ex-wife on good terms? Or a wife and mistress? And who do the two children belong to? This isn’t clear. Do the wives / girlfriends have one each? I want to know! Also, there’s an entertaining Russian in tiny neon speedos who struts around the pool area with his oily chest puffed out like a cockatoo. Yesterday he jumped into the pool and started doing his splashy front crawl to the other end, only to veer off course and swim smack into the wall. 

The hotel staff are very nice and say yes to everything, even if they don’t have it: ‘Do you have any english papers?’ I asked one of them yesterday. ‘Yeez?’ she replied, backing out of the room nervously and not returning.

Ed: could I have a coffee?

Waiter who looks like Cliff Richard in the 70s: hot chocolate?

Ed: coffee?

Cliff: hot chocolate?

Ed: no. Coffee

Cliff: hot chocolate

Ed: coffee!

Cliff: hot chocolate!

Ed was returning from the breakfast buffet with a plate full of food when Cliff stopped him:

‘You should take picture of that Sir, so that you can tells her [pointing at me] to make it for you every day when you gets home! Eh? Hahahahaha!’

He’s got a 1970s sense of humour too.

I should add that in the time of typing this I have managed to burn a large section of one leg I forgot to slap suncream onto – the rest of me, after four days of intensive sunbathing, has reached a deep shade of off white. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some urgent turning over to do.

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