Things are getting exciting.

Oh yes they are! Susan is, as previously noted, coming home, and it's getting more real by the day. She has her flight booked for 18th August, arrives here on the nineteenth, and the wedding is booked for 14th October, which will give us a week of married life before the world ends, if Harold Camping's calculations are correct. The reception's booked too, food dude and disco dude are re-engaged and it's all systems go.

We have a new flat to go with our new status; I will have moved in before she gets here but it is OURS, and we are making decisions jointly regarding decor and so on. It's one bus stop from where I am now and is in an ideal location for us, AND it's rented from the local council, so we have a secure tenancy, no problems with repairs etc, and a better flat than we could have got for the same money renting privately, not to mention central heating and laundry facilities including driers in the building. I have been out just today and bought us a suite for the living room, with couch-bed and easy chair. I will make a phone call tomorrow to arrange delivery of that, and also expect to speak to a painter and decorator about our walls. I'm feeling more married every day, and it is absolutely wonderful.

And then, if all that weren't enough, this week came the exciting news from Albany that New York state has passed a marriage equality law: all our gay friends there will now have the same right to marry as we would if we were there. As that includes at least one couple who have been together for over thirty years, this is in truth merely correcting a nonsense that has existed until now, is just putting right a long-standing social wrong, but it is also another sign that we are in the middle of a civil rights revolution that matches the great victories of Martin Luther King and his allies in the US in the fifties and sixties. Of course it also means that Anthony and Bob might now be married before Susan and I are, but hey, you can't have everything, and it would mean they were dancing at our wedding as husbands legally and officially as well as in reality.

Well, anyway, I just felt I had to get that lot off my chest. And besides, it's been a while and I've been neglecting my dodophobiacs.