To absent friends ...

Jess, on the left, is Ruby's best friend. Which is only fitting, as Jess's dad is my best friend, and his mother is my mother's best friend ...

And so we are continuing the years of holidaying together as a unit, but this generation abandoning spanish villas and hotels in Lanzarote for dog-friendly caravans in bits of the UK with Big Hills. Fab.

When we first got home on Monday night, Ruby was excited to be back. Now she is depressed. She is searching and searching for her friend, going into my housemates' rooms at six this morning and crying pathetically ... and she is sad not to find her.

I wish I could explain. I wish she could understand the concepts of 'again' and 'soon'.

I went to the lakes to attend the wedding of some very dear friends. Lovely lovely people, and I would have married either of them - they are gorgeous inside and out. The sun shone and their little boys looked like a tiny mafia in their supercool suits. And it was perfect in so many ways, but glaringly imperfect in another. Another friend who should have been there, laughing in the sunshine, holding his wife's hand and smiling, because he never stopped smiling, is gone. He died suddenly just over 2 years ago, without warning, of a heart defect. He was skiing one moment, dying the next. She was there with him when he died, and as awful, as horrific and traumatic as that was, she says she knows she would never have believed it if she hadn't seen it with her own eyes.

So, there were happy tears, for those we love who are still with us, and sad tears for those who aren't. Not physically anyway. Very present in many other ways, spoken about (thankfully) and laughed about and remembered, and very much still loved.

I am doing my italian widow look she said with a smile, replacing her shades.

I know he would have enjoyed the joke.