Saturday

Today is the day I have to finally cut the cord - by killing my iPhone and sending it off to be recycled. It's been by my side for a long time now and not a day has gone by that I haven't used it and been thankful that I have it. The maps app has got me out of a lot of sticky situations; I've checked Facebook and Twitter on it god knows how many times; games like Doodle Jump, Paper Toss, Peggle, Vector Runner and - most recently - my beloved Angry Birds have made tube and bus journeys fly by. But now I'm plugging it into iTunes and hitting 'restore factory settings'. Not even a whimper, and it's dead.

I pop my deceased friend into the jiffy bag provided by O2 and walk up towards the post office in Wood Green. K has gone out with her sister to visit some sort of craft fair in Bethnal Green, leaving me free to spend the morning pottering. The queue in the post office though, is massive - so I give up on the idea of sending my phone off by recorded delivery and just dump in the post box instead, trusting the surprisingly-large-amount-of-money I've been promised for it to the regular mails.

I wander back home through Wood Green's many lovely shops and attractions, to meet K and her - now two - sisters back at home. We begin preparing to head over to Crouch End for Tim's birthday BBQ by having a quick shandy and liberally applying suncream. The walk is a hot one, and by the time we get to the house all I want to do is sit in the shade and drink beer all day. Luckily, no one is planning to stop me from doing this.

Rich and Susie, our housemates from last year, are there - and it's nice to see them after so long to catch up. The whole group of us also manage to get a little drunk and overenthusiastic about making mine and K's wedding into a Back to the Future-themed event, with Mike acting as a Marty McFly-style vicar and involving, of course, a Delorean wedding car. It's been my dream, literally since I was five years old, to one day own or even drive a Delorean. Could this be my only chance? I can't see K going for it in the cold light of day, to be honest.