Ok. Now this is too bizarre. I booked Jon's and my tickets for Sydney in the morning with the plan that we'd fly to Sydney on the 2nd February, then fly over to New Zealand to arrive in Christchurch in time for Liam and Nicola's wedding.

That was until the text message from Jon in the evening telling me the wedding had been cancelled. They'd been having a big row, apparently. Pah! That's a £120 cancellation fee I'm going to have to swallow for the privilege of having owned tickets to Sydney for about 6 hours. Not impressed.

Mildred went back in for exploratory surgery today to try and find the 4000 rpm vibration that is quite annoying and means I have to go faster than 70mph all the time. I got loaned the garage's C15 van - into which they'd transplanted a tuned XM turbo diesel engine - which went far too fast to be non-scary. It was quite capable of more than a ton and the acceleration was really vicious. The guy in the Z3 looked seriously stunned when he caught up with me at the next roundabout. Despite its appearance (it was liveried and had phat tyres on and I don't usually like boy-racered cars) it appealed to my BMW-taunting sense of humour.