With Iu and Loki back from Romania, we decided to do an outing together, particularly as the rain prevented the hordes from descending for Saturday tennis at ours. This is how it played out... Not that there's anything wrong with wanting to marry your best friend, even if he's the same sex. Honest.

It's very rare that Iu and Loki and I are apart of a weekend. But recently, Iu and Loki went for a flying visit (a couple of nights) to Romania to visit rellies, leaving me to hold the fort, mid-diet on my own back in London. This proved to be problematic for me... I don't manage well left to my own devices.

There are some people who are good talkers, and there are others who just shouldn't be. We met one of those people who falls into the latter camp... So that was good news, but it's back to the diet again.

After the biopsy, I lost my voice and became this strange observer disconnected from the real world. In some ways it was quite liberating. Until the results were due in...

After my heart ablation, I found I was virtually unable to speak, which for me is akin to death. In fact, dead people don't feel the need to chat, so it isn't as bad for them. I popped along to the doctor and she immediately suggested a biopsy, marking the case as urgent with the words 'suspected cancer' on the letter. Now, at no stage did we talk about cancer being suspected, but the moment you see that on the letter, you start to envisage your end, no matter how remote the

Since hitting my mid-50s, I've started to bio-degrade more rapidly than I did in my 40's. It catches you a little by surprise how quickly your body says 'oh ffs, will you stop?'. The Xmas period was essentially an all-out cough-a-thon for me, accompanied by acute arthritis and a dodgy ticker in atrial fibulation. So first thing to address was the heart - and even though I'd had a heart operation to fix my arrhythmia before (it failed), we thought we'd give it another go. Here