Monday 4 August

Our daughter Liz has been with her boyfriend Paul for four years. All through that time, she has told us that she's not sure that he is the one for her. We didn't pay too much attention to that, because as far as we could see they always seemed very happy together. Mary and I both like Paul, and we thought of him as our ideal son-in-law. When we visited them last summer they looked just like a contentedly married couple, curled up together on the sofa watching the television. But still Liz was uncertain whether she wanted to stay with him on a long term basis.

Mary once asked her what was holding her back from a commitment to him. She snorted and said "It would be like marrying my Dad." Personally, I don't think she could hope for a better role model for a husband than that. But apparently she thinks otherwise.

When she came to stay with us for a few days last month, she told us that she had made up her mind to break up with Paul. We hoped that this was just a reaction to the stresses of her final exams, and that she would change her mind when she saw him again. But that didn't happen, and they have now definitely decided to split up. We're very sad about this, but glad that it was done in a civilised way and they are still friends. In fact, they are still sharing their house in Hampshire, and we are going there to stay with them next weekend. After that, Liz will come back home to live with us for a while, bringing her little cat Tiffin with her. When our cat Rosie died last month, I had a hunch that it might not be too long before we somehow had another cat in our lives. But I didn't guess that it would happen as soon as this.

I'm looking forward to having Liz back home for a few months, even though it probably means she'll be fighting me for access to the computer most evenings.

We're having a heatwave this week. In England, whenever the temperature goes above 70° the media announce a heatwave and wonder how people are going to cope with the crippling heat. But this time we're having a genuine heatwave. Even on our windy hilltop it was nearly 90° today, and they are forecasting that the coming week will be the hottest ever recorded in Britain, with a possibility of a temperature of 100° for the first time ever. Happily, we chose this week and next for our summer holiday. We're not going abroad this summer. Instead, we are going to visit several relatives and friends on the south coast. We're leaving on Wednesday and should be away for 10-12 days. Don't look for an update here until about the 20th. If you want another web page to look at in the meantime, you'll find my photos of last month's Scottish holiday on our family web site here.

Tuesday 19 August

Well that was a holiday with a difference. We haven't done anything like that before, but we liked it so much that we'll probably do something similar next year.

We were away for 12 days, and we made a circuit of the south of England, visiting friends and relatives. We saw 11 separate sets of people, and also stopped off in several picturesque towns on route. We stayed for two nights with old friends in Suffolk, three nights with Liz and Paul in Hampshire and two nights with my brother and his family in Dorset. The rest of the time we stayed in B&Bs, and this turned out to be cheaper than staying with friends or family. The reason is that if you stay for more than one night in someone's house you feel obliged to take them out for dinner at a nice restaurant. This can cost at least two or three times as much as the average B&B charges for a double room. Not that I'm complaining – the holiday was well worth the expense.

The trip was structured around the party that Mary's brother and his wife gave to celebrate their 40th anniversary, at their home on Bognor Regis. By coincidence my brother's 60th birthday was just a few days later, and we were able to be with him and his family for that. Having decided to make the trip down south for these two events, we made a list of all the people we wanted to see in that part of the world. We came up with far more people than we could visit in two weeks, so we contacted about half of them and left the rest for another time. Among those that we did get to see were an old school friend of mine who was also a neighbour of Mary's when they were children. Neither of us had seen Roger for about 40 years and we had totally lost touch with him. He and his wife invited us for lunch at their home in Lewes, and we spent the afternoon reminiscing about the past and catching up with each other's lives.

We also visited a cousin of Mary's on the Isle of Wight, where we spent a couple of days. Jackie was one of Mary's bridesmaids at our wedding when she was about four years old, and we haven't seen her since (except very briefly at a family funeral last year). She is now in her 40s and has two little girls of her own. We all went for lunch, together with another of Mary's cousins, to a pub in the village of Shorwell, before going back to their house for tea and then to the beach at Shanklin, where we had a picnic fish and chips supper and played beach cricket until nightfall.

At my brother's house we met some Canadian cousins who were visiting from Vancouver. Like us, they were travelling round the country visiting sundry relatives.

This is beginning to get boring, so I'll skip the bit about visiting friends in Exeter and yet another cousin, in Somerset. After that, we went back to Liz and Paul's place to collect as many of Liz's possessions as we could fit into the car, to bring back to our house. Next month I'll drive down to Hampshire again to collect the rest of Liz's things and bring her and her cat home to live with us until she decides what to do next with her life. We also said goodbye to her (ex-)boyfriend Paul, telling him how sorry we were that things hadn't worked out between them and hoping that we won't lose touch with him.

For the whole holiday we had perfect summer weather. Mary and I both like the heat, but even we found it too hot at times. On the day when history was made by the thermometer going over 100°F for the first time ever in Britain, we stayed indoors in Liz's house with the blinds drawn and passed the time reading the Sunday papers. In a country where houses don't have air conditioning, heat like that is a bit excessive. There's also something wrong with the cooling system in our car which makes it overheat in stationary traffic. I had to nurse it along by putting the selector lever into neutral whenever we had to stop. Our Volvo is over ten years old now, and I'm going to sell it next spring, before we get any more hot weather.

So now we're home again, and I'm starting to plan our next holiday. But I'll leave that for another journal entry.

Monday 25 August August Bank Holiday

Today is the last Bank Holiday until Christmas and, in the north of England at any rate, it looks as though summer is well and truly over. It was fine enough at the weekend, and we sat out on the patio to have lunch and read the Sunday papers. But today has been cold and cloudy. After a whole month of record breaking heat, that takes a bit of getting used to.

It hasn't been a wasted day, though, because at last I have finished repairing and painting the garage doors. I started this job at the end of April, and I had no idea that it would take so long. No – that's not true. I knew perfectly well that I would find all sorts of excuses for delay, and that each stage of the job would be strung out over several weeks. But now it's all done, the doors are resplendent in green and white gloss inside and out, and I hope they'll stay weatherproof for a good few years before they need further attention. By then I'll probably be too aged and infirm to do the job myself and I'll have to pay someone to do it. But I prefer not to think about that.

Our second grandson, David, is two and a half months old and we still haven't seen him. Steve and family were hoping to come to England at the beginning of this month, but their plans were thwarted by Spanish bureaucracy. They couldn't come until David had a passport (babies are no longer allowed to travel on a parent's passport), and they couldn't get a passport without producing a birth certificate. Getting documents like that can take weeks or months in Spain. There was no sign of any progress, and I was convinced that they would not be able to come here this summer. We had contingency plans to go to Spain to visit them in September if they were unable to come here.

I was going to phone Steve a couple of days ago to see whether we should put these plans into action. But then he called to say that the passport had arrived and they are going to come to England next month. He was about to book their flight online, but there's just one little snag: EasyJet doesn't accept payment by Spanish Visa cards, for some obscure reason. So guess who has to make the bookings and pay for them with his English Visa card? Oh well, we tell ourselves that it's a small price to pay for the pleasure of having our family to stay with us for a few days.

In fact, they will only be staying with us for a very few days. They'll be going to see Jo's mother and sister first, and then they will only have two or three days with us before they have to go back to Spain for the start of Tom's school term. Liz will be here too, so we're going to have quite a full house for those few days.

Friday 29 August

The theme of this web site is supposed to be what it's like to be a gay married man. But sometimes it seems to me that the journal has degenerated into being a continual travelogue. I can't help that. The fact is that sexual orientation is not the most important thing in my life, whereas travel is something that I love and can't get enough of.

Fortunately, Mary also loves to travel. For a long time, her chronic fatigue, and then her allergies and chemical sensitivities, made it hard for her. But she has now recovered to the extent that we can think in terms of planning a trip that we have dreamed of for a very long time.

Under the terms of my partial retirement deal with the University, I'll be completely free of responsibilities after the January exams are out of the way, for each of the next three years, with no more commitments until the following September. Our idea was that we would use this opportunity go on a round the world trip to Australia and New Zealand, some time early in 2005. But two things have happened recently that made us think again about the timing. One was that our cats have both died, so we no longer have to worry about making arrangements for them to be looked after while we're away. The other thing is that Liz is coming back to live with us for a few months, so she can look after the house while we're gone. These things made us think that it would be better to grab the chance while we can, and while Mary's health remains reasonably good, and to bring the trip forward by a year, to 2004. Another consideration is that the apartment in Gran Canaria where we have gone for the previous two winter holidays is not available next year, so we have to think of some other way to escape the British winter.

So we have taken the plunge, and booked flights with Travelbag. We leave on 1 February, and we'll be stopping in Hawaii for a week, then Fiji (3 days), New Zealand (nearly 4 weeks), Australia (nearly 3 weeks) and Hong Kong (4 days), arriving back home on 31 March. The tickets cost just over £1000 each, which seems very reasonable to me, but we paid nearly half as much again in order to get "World Traveller Plus" upgrades for the long-haul flights from London to Honolulu (with a stopover in Los Angeles) and from Hong Kong to London.

That leaves me with a lot of homework to do in the next few weeks, planning the details of the trip, deciding on accommodation, car rental (camper van rental for the New Zealand part of the trip) and other reservations that have to be made in advance. We'll keep things as flexible as possible and not commit ourselves in advance more than we need to. But some things, like the ferry between North and South Islands in New Zealand, get fully booked unless you make reservations well beforehand.

I have sent off to Amazon for the Lonely Planet guides to Hawaii, New Zealand and Australia, and I'm really looking forward to reading through them and making plans. For me, the preparations for a holiday like this are almost as enjoyable as the trip itself. I love looking at maps and guide books, and preparing itineraries.

The British news media have been dominated all week by reports on the Hutton enquiry. The government restricted its terms of reference so that it would focus narrowly on the events leading up to the apparent suicide of the distinguished UN weapons inspector David Kelly. But hopefully the enquiry will broaden out to investigate the preposterous claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons that posed an imminent threat to the UK and could be launched within 45 minutes, and how this claim came to be believed by government ministers and other gullible folk.

The highlight of the week was featured on the main ITV news bulletin on Wednesday. It showed the Secretary of State for Defence, Geoff Hoon, arriving at the enquiry to present his evidence (which essentially consisted of "It wasn't me, guv. I wasn't there. Nobody told me anything."). The TV news showed him being greeted by a group of protesting youngsters who were singing "You ain't nothing but a Hoon dog, Lyin' all the time."

How very gratifying that today's kids still remember the good old Elvis Presley songs that enriched my teenage years when they first came out. Even more gratifying that they can adapt them to such creative use.

Geoff Hoon's evidence was indeed evasive and self serving. But no more so than that of most of the other senior government figures who have appeared before Lord Hutton. It remains to be seen, however, whether the noble lord's final report will be anything more than a whitewash.

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