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so it’s not like I’d be the only dried-up husk of a medical miracle if I was pregnant, which I’m not, because as you may have noticed, I’m the best part of the way down a bottle of Cab Sauv! Which I’d hardly be doing if I was fucking pregnant, would I now, Miss Marple?’

      ‘I suppose not,’ I conceded grudgingly. ‘So what is it then?’

      ‘Shall we guess? Let’s guess!’ suggested Sam excitedly. ‘We could make a drinking game of it and do shots every time we get it wrong?’

      ‘Or Hannah could just tell us, because I am her best friend and she tells me everything, like she promised she would when we were eleven,’ I said. ‘Maybe she’ll just tell me, and not you, Sam, because I’m her best friend!’

      ‘Ah,’ said Sam. ‘But I am her best gay friend, which means, according to the laws of cliché, that actually she tells me everything.’

      ‘Ha!’ I said. ‘Yes, but according to the laws of cliché, after a Gay Best Friend is told a secret, they have to go shoe shopping with you and then drink Cosmopolitans, and you hate shoe shopping and Cosmos give you heartburn. I WIN!’

      ‘My God!’ said Hannah. ‘Do you actually WANT to hear my news, or do you just want to squabble between yourselves until I put you on the naughty step?’

      ‘I know. You’ve won the lottery! Like millions and squillions and you are going to share it with your best friend,’ I squawked.

      ‘Will you both shut the fuck up? I’m not preggers and I’ve not won the lottery, BUT Charlie has proposed. We haven’t officially announced it yet, because we haven’t told our parents, but I couldn’t keep it a secret. Look, look at my ring!’ said Hannah smugly, fishing a rather swanky little leather box out of her bag.

      ‘Oh my God! Oh my actual fucking God! You’re getting married! To Charlie. It’s like a fairy story,’ I babbled, only slightly tearfully, because my best friend in the whole wide world was getting married again, and this time to a lovely man, instead of a dickhead goblin troll, like her horrible first husband who had unexpectedly walked out on her three years ago.

      ‘Oh, babe. That’s amazeballs!’ said Sam, also with suspiciously moist eyes. ‘Oh, wait. I’m trying to stop saying “amazeballs”. Sophie told me it was the lamest thing she had ever heard and she was embarrassed for me.’

      ‘Ooooh, just look at the rock too!’ I squeaked. ‘Shiny shiny shiny. Put it on. Oh, blissful bling, it’s gorgeous! And can I help you plan the wedding? Please say I can? What about a dress? When is it? Oooh, you should totally have one of those vintage shabby chic weddings in a barn, with hay bales and antique bottles full of wildflowers and wellies under your wedding dress!’

      ‘Ellen, does it ever occur to you that you spend a tiny bit too much time on Pinterest?’ enquired Sam.

      ‘No. There is no such thing as spending too much time on Pinterest. And anyway, I am the one who got Hannah and Charlie together, so I should totes be the wedding planner extraordinaire. And the guest of honour. Oh, frabjous day! I can finally buy my dream hat. Oh, I’m so glad you are getting married, Hannah, and I can get a hat.’

      ‘Firstly, Sophie informs me that “totes” is also one of the things only lame, sad old people say, and secondly, some people might say that getting Hannah and Charlie together now was the least you could do, after breaking his poor heart at university and letting poor Hannah pine after him for all those years, so that they ended up marrying unsuitable other people,’ said Sam, rather unkindly, I thought.

      It is true that Hannah and Charlie and I do go back a very long way, and it is also true that I might have once led him on a tiny bit and then made out with Simon instead, and possibly, yes, if I was a better person then maybe Hannah and Charlie would’ve got together twenty years ago, but I did do the right thing in the end when I bumped into Charlie a couple of years ago, and so really I think I do deserve all the credit. And the best hat at the wedding.

      ‘We are talking about hats, Sam, not past indiscretions,’ I said with dignity, before babbling more at Hannah about my Vision for her elegant, rustic, Pinterest-tastic wedding.

      ‘I don’t want to get married in a barn with wellies under my dress, though,’ protested Hannah. ‘And anyway, we haven’t even set a date yet, so put down your phone and stop bidding on vintage bottles on eBay, Ellen!’

      ‘I was just looking!’ I said indignantly. ‘There’s no harm in looking. Ooooh, just think, we can go dress shopping. And get shitfaced again on the free champagne in the posh dress shops.Oh, just think … A wedding dress. An elegant, tasteful one, not a confection of taffeta monstrousness like last time. Can I be a bridesmaid? Can I still wear a hat if I’m a bridesmaid? Emily and Sophie and Jane could be bridesmaids too!’

      ‘Ellen, I’m forty-two, and we are both getting married for the second time. I’m not having dozens of bridesmaids – this is not the Royal Wedding, you know!’

      ‘It would be nice,’ I muttered sulkily.

      ‘I’ve DONE the big wedding, Ellen. And had no control of it, because my mother arranged most of it, and what my mother didn’t take over, my bloody ex-monster-in-law did, as she did her best to make the day all about her, right down to the old hag turning up at the church in what looked suspiciously like a wedding dress herself, before trying to claim that it was “tradition” for her to dance the first dance with my new husband. I want this day to be about Charlie and me. And you are my best friend, and so of course I want you to be involved and help me plan it. Just don’t get carried away!’

      ‘Can I get carried away with my hat at least?’ I demanded.

      ‘Do what you like with your bloody hat!’ said Hannah.

      Monday, 12 September

      Today is my birthday. I am now the grandly depressing age of forty-two. And it is a Monday. There should be a law against having birthdays on Mondays. It is absolutely the worst day of the week to have a birthday on.

      My forty-second birthday was not nearly as good as my fortieth. I had been rather in dread of my fortieth, convinced that it was nothing more than the marking of the inexorable slide into cronedom and haghood, that it would be the bringer of sagging and wrinkling and walking into a room only to announce that I couldn’t remember what I had gone in there for (actually, that is happening more and more). But in the event, Simon swept me off to Paris for a gloriously romantic weekend (though I do not recommend having sex after you have been eating croissants in bed, the crumbs get everywhere and are very hard to remove).

      We walked hand in hand by the Seine, and Simon grumbled yet again about why I felt the need to buy old postcards (‘Because I just do, OK, Simon, it’s not my fault that you have no soul’), we baulked in horror at the queues for the Eiffel Tower, and Simon was forced to bundle me out the Louvre when I took exception to the crowds of tourists clustered around the Mona Lisa, as I was very hot and rather over people and was remarking loudly that I was not at all impressed and wasn’t it rather small and dingy a painting for people to make such a fuss about, and some of the tourists, having travelled halfway across the world to make a dream come true by seeing the Mona Lisa, were muttering and taking exception to my views on Great Art. Due to the many people in Paris, I also found it necessary to frequently pop into bijou cafés and have my equilibrium restored with delightful pichets of vin rouge, which meant that I largely spent the weekend in a splendidly blurry haze.

      There was one quite unfortunate moment, though, when Simon left me alone in the very posh hotel, as I wanted a soak in the bath, and he decided to go down to the bar for a drink. The hotel had the most gloriously huge, deep, wide bathtub I had ever seen – not only that, but it was a Jacuzzi bath! Oh the bliss, I thought! How relaxed and reinvigorated I would be after a good old wallow in that!

      I tipped the tiny little bottle of ‘complimentary’ bubble bath into the splendidly deep, hot bath I had run, hopped in and set the Jacuzzi settings

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