David Nicholls

Every week seems to bring another luxuriantly creamy envelope, the thickness of a letter-bomb, containing a complex invitation _ a triumph of paper engineering _ and a comprehensive dossier of phone numbers, email addresses, websites, how to get there, what to wear, where to buy the gifts. Country house hotels are being block-booked, great schools of salmon are being poached, vast marquees are appearing overnight like Bedouin tent cities. Silky grey morning suits and top hats are being hired and worn with an absolutely straight face, and the times are heady and golden for florists and caterers, string quartets and Ceilidh callers, ice sculptors and the makers of disposable cameras. Decent Motown cover-bands are limp with exhaustion. Churches are back in fashion, and these days the happy couple are travelling the short distance from the place of worship to the reception on open-topped London buses, in hot-air balloons, on the backs of matching white stallions, in micro-lite planes. A wedding requires immense reserves of love and commitment and time off work, not least from the guests. Confetti costs eight pounds a box. A bag of rice from the corner shop just won__ cut it anymore.

The beauty of the ultrasound scan is something that only parents can appreciate, but Emma had seen these things before and knew what was required of her. __eautiful,_ she sighed, though in truth it could have been a Polaroid of the inside of his pocket.

He wanted to live life to the extreme, but without any mess or complications. He wanted to live life in such a way that if a photograph were taken at random, it would be a cool photograph. Things should look right. Fun; there should be a lot of fun and no more sadness than absolutely necessary.

I have always been well liked, I think, always well regarded and respected, but having few enemies is not the same as having many friends, and there was no denying that I was, if not "lonely", more solitary than I'd hoped to be at that time.

Lonely' is a troubling word and not one to be tossed around lightly. It makes people uncomfortable, summoning up as it does all kinds of harsher adjectives, like 'sad' or 'strange'. I have always been well liked, I think, always well regarded and respected, but having few enemies is not the same as having many friends, and there was no denying that I was, if not 'lonely', more solitary than I'd hoped to be at that time.

Occasionally, very occasionally, say at four o__lock in the afternoon on a wet Sunday, she feels panic-stricken and almost breathless with loneliness. Once or twice she has been known to pick up the phone to check that it isn__ broken. Sometimes she thinks how nice it would be to be woken by a call in the night: __et in a taxi now_ or __ need to see you, we need to talk_. But at the best of times she feels like a character in a Muriel Spark novel _ independent, bookish, sharp-minded, secretly romantic.

It's scented! Your wedding invitations are scented?""It's meant to be lavender.""No, Dex - it's money. It smells of money.

Familiarity, globalisation, cheap travel, mere weariness had diluted our sense of foreign-ness.

Paris was all so... Parisian. I was captivated by the wonderful wrongness of it all - the unfamiliar fonts, the brand names in the supermarket, the dimensions of the bricks and paving stones. Children, really quite small children, speaking fluent French!

There is a point in the future where even the worst disaster starts to settle into an anecdote.

These days grief seems like walking on a frozen river; most of the time he feels safe enough, but there is always that danger that he will plunge through. Now he hears the ice creak beneath him, and so intense and panicking is the sensation that he has to stand for a moment, press his hands to his face and catch his breath.

It didn't help when he told David that his mother would always be with him, even if he couldn't see her. An unseen mother couldn't go for long walks with you on summer evenings, drawing the names of trees and flowers from her seemingly infinite knowledge of nature; or help you with your homework, the familiar scent of her in your nostrils as she leaned in to correct a misspelling or puzzle over the meaning of an unfamiliar poem; or read with you on cold Sunday afternoons when the fire

...grief is as much about regret for what you've never had as sadness for what you've lost.

And there it is again, the look. There's no doubt about it, if Sylvie had a receipt, she would have taken him back by now; this one's gone wrong. It's not what I wanted.

You should visit the Palatine. It's at the top of that hill . . .""I know where the Palatine is, Dexter, I was visiting Rome before you were born.""Yes, who was emperor back then?

Who's he seeing now then?""No idea. They're like funfair goldfish; no point giving them names, they never last that long.

He hadn't been this nervous since the last disastrous night at the improv, and he firmly told himself to calm down as he blotted at the tablecloth, glancing upwards to see Emma wriggling out of her summer jacket, pushing her shoulders back and her chest forward in that way that women do without realising the ache they cause.

He swatted at her with his book. "Shut up and read, will you?"He lay back down and closed his eyes. Emma glanced over to check that he was smiling, and smiled too.