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hundred pounds.’
    And it is my perfect dress. Not the elegant cream tube Cordelia’s selected and which might just about go round one of my thighs, but an off-the-shoulder romantic dream of a dress. The type of thing Millandra would wear to a ball or that Jake would lift gently from her soft skin…
    Am I getting obsessed here? That’s what happens when I can’t write stuff down. In any case, I tried the dress on and it was
perfect
, skimming over any less-than-toned bits and making my boobs look like soft high peaches. The creamy satin was just the right shade for my pale skin and made my flesh look warm and tanned. In fact it’s the only dress I’ve ever worn that’s made me look good!
    I tell you, I could practically have fancied myself.
    I simply have to have it!
    But Cordelia’s looking at me as though I’ve sprouted another head.
    ‘Debenhams!’ she whispers, one bony claw held theatrically to where her heart would be if she had one. ‘I take you to Vera Wang,
where Jennifer Aniston shops
, and you want to go to Debenhams?’
    I’m tempted to say that if she throws in Brad Pitt I’ll go to Vera Wang with joy, but since Cordelia truly believes that James is Brad Pitt, Einstein and baby Jesus all rolled into one, I keep my mouth shut.
    ‘What’s wrong with you?’ asks Cordelia, slumped now against our electric Aga. ‘Are you trying to ruin the wedding?’
    ‘Of course not!’ I say, although actually wanting to take her Vera Wang brochure and shove it up her backside. ‘It’s just that I tried on this other dress yesterday and it looked much better. My friend said I looked lovely.’
    Probably best not to tell her that the friend in question was Ollie and that the expression he used wasn’t ‘lovely’ but ‘totally shagadelic’. Which, thinking about it, is probably one of the nicest things anyone’s ever said to me.
    Cordelia looks extremely doubtful. But then she hasn’t seen me trying to squeeze into the size eight sample of the designer silk sheath she’s set her heart on. I looked like a snake shedding its skin in reverse.
    ‘And,’ I continue, ‘I can have it practically off the peg! All they need to do is shorten it a little.’
    ‘Off the peg?’ shudders Cordelia. ‘I think not. There’s not going to be anything cheap and tacky about this wedding. If James insists on…’ she pauses and the words
marrying you
hang almost visibly in the air like something out of
Harry Potter
, ‘having this wedding, then I shall do my utmost to make it perfect for him. And if that means a designer gown for his fiancée then so be it.’
    It’s lucky for Cordelia that I’ve been doing anger management strategies with my tutor group this week, because otherwise she’d be wearing the frying pan. And since it’s a Le Creuset and requires two men to lift it, I don’t think she’d have been a pretty sight. But as she’s going to be my mother-in-law I take a deep breath and count to ten while she continues to huff and puff about my (many) flaws, the main one apparently my being related to my eccentric parents, which seems a tad unfair since I’m hardly wild about this myself. When she finally stops recalling the episode in 1989 when Dad passed out on her doorstep — he’d been a bit confused about where Jewell lived — I seize my chance to speak. After all, who knows when she’ll next let me get a word in?
    ‘I really like that dress,’ I say, through gritted teeth. ‘My dad says he’ll buy it for me too, so you needn’t worry about paying. I was going to go back and put a deposit down.’
    ‘There’s no need for that,’ Cordelia says hastily, no doubt picturing me in some hippy number drifting up the aisle in a cloud of cannabis smoke. ‘I’m more than happy to buy my son’s fiancée a wedding dress. Now tell me, how did today’s fitting go?’
    Have you ever had that horrible feeling when your blood goes all icy cold and seems to drain out of your body, leaving your legs all