N&P's wedding celebration

N&P are our dear friends and last month they eloped to Rome. Their story is immensely romantic. P loved N from the moment he saw her, when they both worked on the graphics & production desk for a TV company, in the mid-nineties, and they started going out just before J and I did. They moved in, and then they moved again and bought a flat near us in Wood Green. We were neighbours. Then N became ill with ME. She couldn't go out, then she couldn't work, then finally, she could barely walk. It was to their flat that we fled when I was attacked, and N made me a bed and gave me clothes - ''soft things'' - and Bach flower remedies to cover my battered body and heal my bruised soul. As N's illness worsened, they moved out to the quiet of Hertfordshire, and N undertook a long, painful programme of injections and limited diet to help her get better, as her condition worsened and she grew weaker and weaker. All through this, P loved her and cared for her, and kept her safe. They sold their house to pay for her treatment, and I never heard either of them complain about anything.

And now they are married, and they returned to host a tea party in their wedding things. N looked beautiful, with P glowing and handsome beside her, the pair of them in white, luminous with love. On their return they called all their friends to a summer celebration, and we went to a manor in Tring, Hertfordshire, and had English high tea, cakes and scones and finger sandwiches on a blazingly hot day. And N was walking, and laughing, with glittering shoes and her hair piled in curls. Children ran about and rolled on the grass, and the day was filled with joy.

Getting back was an adventure. The train stopped at the wrong platform, and left me, J, another guest, two young men who were en route to London for a birthday celebration stranded in the middle of a village in the vountryside at midnight with no train home and not a hotel room to be had. But we managed, a car full of wedding guests came back and picked up the lady who needed to go to Hemel Hempstead, and J and I and the two birthday celebrants all shared a cab back to London with a cheerful driver who used to live in Palmers Green, so knew all the back roads. He treated us to a guided tour of local places where exciting and terrible things had happened. 'Here's the bridge where the double decker bus got stuck, roof sheared off. People on the top deck screaming.' 'No, it was a fatal accident but nobody was killed'. 'Yes, here's the pub with a ghost, woman was murdered, and her baby too; they all ran out screaming one night, closed down for 12 years it did.' ' Here's the house where the man was murdered, millionaire, it was his wife did it, and her boyfriend, they went to Spain with all his money, blamed a burglar but we all knew it was her...'

We found the birthday boy a night club to go to, and he in turn retrieved my lost phone for me. Gentillesse in action, and it was like that all day, with people randomly helping each other, and being helped in return, and by looking out for each other, we all ended up with exactly what we needed. Hurray! And I met another man from the Piccadilly line train too. He's joining KCU - the 113th member.