I am back! Yes, Patsington and I have bid farewell to lovely sunny gelato-filled Italia and returned home to, well, quite warm actually Irlanda. Unfortunately, I seem to have picked up sonme vile lurgy and am all bunged up. Bah. But anyway, it's not that bad to be back, apart from work of course. I've been doing more big features in recent months (as opposed to my usual job of doing lots of relatively short ones on top of my editorial work and my four books pages) and had a very big one to do as soon as I got back, but as most of my colleagues have never worked as features writers, they don't seem to realise quite how much time a 2000 word piece based on two very long interviews will take, so the designer calls me every five seconds to see is it finished yet. A freelancer would have been given at least a couple of weeks to put that together - I had three days, including doing the actual interviews AND I also had to do loads of my usual editorial work AND put together two mini-interviews for the fluffier sections of the publication.

Anyway! Enough moaning. The wedding is over, and with it all the hideous wedding-related stress. The ceremony itself was lovely, although I did kind of charge up the aisle at top speed, leaving my poor parents far behind me. We hadn't been able to decide on the perfect arrival music for our musicians (leedy and Busta J, and my friends Angeline and Pól) so in the end Patsington serenaded me with one of his own songs what he wrote for me. The readings were from John Donne (I have loved this poem since I was 15) and WH Auden (look, it mentions frogs!), and then we were married and Jenny and Lisa sand 'This Moment' by the Incredible String Band, which my parents sang at their own wedding, and the Reverend Bill said "you may kiss the bridegroom" and I did and walked down the aisle with our arms around each other feeling very happy.


And then came the reception, which was initially lots of fun but got more stressful after the feast and the (very nice) speeches. Oh, I was so pleased with myself for exerting a near-fascistic level of control over the musical sections of the evening (although I did ask a couple of friends to do DJ sets, I wasn't too bad), spending days putting together the perfect dancefloor playlist on my iPod. Unfortunately, this meant that I had to deal with the technical problems of the sound desk acting up, as well as constantly checking with my DJing chums when their sets were going to end. This was all surprisingly headwrecking. But it all worked out, and everyone danced like mad to everything from Stevie Wonder to the Slits, and I got to play Huggy Bear's seminal riot grrrl classic 'Her Jazz' (the Huggies would probably not approve of being played at a wedding, but still), and my sister Busta J and I achieved our dream of getting everyone to do synchronised dance moves (to our childhood favourite, Paul Simon's 'You Can Call Me Al' and Five's Joan Jett sampling 'Everybody Get Up' which is one of my all time favourite guilty pleasures) which was awesome (there are photographs of all this, unfortunately). One of my friends said 'It's like being at a brilliant club with all your friends!' which was the best compliment I could have received.

I was SO tired by the end, though, and P and I staggered up to the (vair, vair fancy) Shelbourne Hotel, where the staff had left out champagne and chocolate-covered strawberries, and we felt terrible that we were too knackered to appreciate it all and collapsed into bed. Of course, I couldn't collapse before I had taken out the ten zillion pins that were holding up my very impressive hair (a v fancy stylist who works a lot for the magazine did it) and worked out all the knots from the backcombing. Oh the romance of it all.

So there you go, I am married. I don't feel any different, even though I've read lots of articles saying "oh, you think it won't be differen when you're married if you've been living with someone for years, but it is". Actually, it isn't, and I'm not really surprised, becuase as Patsington said during his speech, we've both felt so right together for years, and the wedding was just to celebrate something lovely that already existed.

Thank you all for your congratulations, by the way! I shall post again later about things that have been rocking my world – the genius of Philip Reeve, the sheer joy of campy German soap operas (you can watch one online about rival ice skaters, one rich, one poor, embroiled in a fierce class war!!), gorgeous Italian food – but I haven't had my breakfast yet, so it will have to wait.

What good luck!

I found the perfect dress for my wedding in a vintage shop on Portobello Road yesterday - 1930s, silk, silvery blue, perfect fit, incredibly beautiful, only £120.

What bad luck!
Having guarded it well all afternoon and evening as we dined out and went for a drink, I returned back to Busta's flat, unwrapped it carefully from its tissue wrappings - and discovered that when the shop assistant had been writing in the freaky shop's log book thing as she was packaging the dress, the dress had obviously come into contact with the wet biro ink and there were a few tiny biro-ish dots ON THE FRONT OF THE SKIRT. Did I burst into tears? Yes I did. However, I calmed down and an inspection this morning revealed that (a) unless you're actually looking for the patch of tiny dots, they're not really noticeable and (b) hopefully they will be cleanable. So it's not a total disaster. But I am still very disappointed that the perfect dress (and it really, really, really is) is no longer perfect.

Finally I can give an answer to those who ask "so when are you getting married?" And it is March 22nd 2008, in the Unitarian Church on St Stephen's Green, a lovely church packed with liberal believers, agnostics and, yes, atheists, right in the centre of Dublin, within sight of the church where my parents got married, a few hundred yards away from where Patsington and I first met, and about five minutes walk from where I was born. I don't think we could have found anywhere nicer or more right.

Although we still haven't set a date for the wedding - it will probably be about this time next year, but it depends on whether and when we can book the Unitarian Church - every so often I have glanced at the myriad "alternative wedding" books and websites that are squarely aimed at the supposedly non-bridezilla indie rock pseudo-hipster who would rather read Bust than Brides. I thought I might find some genuinely imaginative ideas for catering, dress-making, invitations and that sort of thing. But all these sites and books seem to operate on one premise: that your basic idea of a wedding involves a huge amount of fuss. It's taken for granted that you want elaborate flowers, and wedding favours (whatever the hell they are - I mean, I have a vague idea, but we don't do that on this side of the Atlantic), and place settings, and elaborate table decorations, and a guest list that includes everyone you've ever met along with all your parents' friends. So basically all the suggestions seem to be about doing these big things cheaply or in a different way rather than doing something completely different. I read one guide that offered radical suggestions like "you don't actually have to ask the neighbour you haven't talked to since you were five!" Wow, what a relief. Budgetting tips include getting friends to provide the flower arrangements (why the obsession with flowers? I don't care about flowers! I mean, I like them, but they're hardly an essential element in Patsington and I deciding to formalise our commitment to and love for each other) and making your own wedding favours. I dunno, it's not like I want to just have a reception upstairs in a pub, but nor do I think that anything beyond decent food and excellent music are wedding reception essentials. We may end up running off to elope after all (except we won't really, because I do want my family and friends to be there)...