My new favourite place

So, you would think I’d have learned by now that drinking wine at lunchtime is not such a good thing, huh? Or, indeed, eating a three course meal, for that matter. Because now it’s 17.31, I’m back at my desk with all of the day’s work still unfinished (and, yes, unstarted) and do I feel like ploughing through it all now? No, I decidedly do not. And you can’t make me.

Today we visited our wedding venue, Orocco Pier, for lunch. The visit was kind of like a consolation prize, for today is a bad day for me, being the day my parents leave for Florida for their annual summer holiday. They’re up there now, in the sky. It’s quite disconcerting having parents in the sky, especially if, like me, you suffer from The Panic. Even if the plane doesn’t crash, they still have to stay safe while driving around central Florida for two weeks, and ohmygod what if something happens to them? And also: what if something happens to us while they’re gone?

This last bit of angst is not quite as far-fetched as it seems considering that this time last year my parents’ plane hadn’t even left the ground and Terry was in hospital having an emergency operation on his fistula. My parents were in international departures, Terry’s mum was in Crete, and, in short, wasn’t a body around to drag me back down from the ceiling and convince me that it was all going to be OK. They said the operation would take an hour: it took three. By the third hour I was seriously considering going and knocking on the door of the woman across the road and asking her to come and sit with me before I done LOST MY MIND, people.

Serious illness has a way of making you feel much more vulnerable than you otherwise would. And that’s not to say that I wouldn’t be sitting here obsessively refreshing Sky News and waiting for news of a plane crash if Terry hadn’t been ill – but I have to admit that I’ve never felt more alone than I did on that day last year, and I pretty much live in fear of a repeat performance. Our health and happiness seems so much more fragile than other people’s. I know it’s not really – hell, the events of this time last year are testament to that. But the fact remains that we’re still more likely to have to rush to hospital suddenly than most people are, and it’s at times like this that I’m most aware of that.

God, that was depressing, wasn’t it? Here, have a photo of the Forth Rail Bridge to make up for it:

  This is where we’ll probably have some of our wedding pictures taken – it’s just a stone’s throw away from the venue (we’ll get married in front of a huge window looking out onto this same view) and will no doubt be swimming in rainwater in March. It was nice and sunny today, though, and ohmigod, the food was good. It gave us both a warm, fuzzy feeling about the wedding, and no, it wasn’t the wine.

And now it’s SIX o’clock and I haven’t done any work. Gah.