Redfern by way of Bangkok

We squeezed in a couple of nights in Bangkok between Sweden and Australia - it was tight as we had a deadline to arrive in Sydney in time for my god-daughter Zuzu's christening. We were pretty zapped after the emotional wrench of leaving and a long journey from Stockholm to Bangkok via London so we were content to settle in at our favourite hotel (the Amari Atrium, a bargain at £30 a night B&B), popping out only to eat soup street-side and to shop at the sprawling MBK department store.

This delectable nectar is found on any street corner in the Big Mango

We arrived in Sydney on Friday morning and slept for most of the day while our friends Mike and Netan were at work. The christening, which was a bit of a hilarious Kath & Kim-esque farce to future-proof Zuzu's choice of schools, was held on Saturday. We arrived at the church only to be chastised by the shell-suited priest who asked us to move to one area of the church and "maintain an atmosphere of silence" (heathens!).

Child! Are you ready to embrace God?

Changed into his gowns, the priest led our gaggle of ignoramuses (or is that ignorami?) through the process. The first stumbling block came when Mike answered his query as to the purpose of the day as being to "christen" Zuzu. Turns out the Catholic church baptises its followers - whoops. Also turns out that being a "godparent" according to the Catholic church is something other than what I'd discussed with Mike and Netan. If they were indeed looking for someone to guide Zuzu through her relationship with God according to the Catholic church, they had definitely made a terrible error in judgment in selecting me for the role.

Sermons or mangoes?

I'd solemnly promised Mike and Netan that I'd always be there for Zuzu, I'd spoil her rotten, I'd teach her how to bake cakes and eat mangos, I'd introduce her to Frujus and emus and I'd listen to the boohoos, but the formerly shell-suited priest with the broad Ocker accent didn't seem to put much weight in any of these vows. Instead he wanted me to swear my allegiance to the Catholic church and all it stands for. My lips did not even move during that "I do".

Sydney boardwalking

Mike & Zuzu at Eveleigh Farmers' Market

Zuzu's front yard

Flashbacks to the alter come and go

Matt headed off to New Zealand a week earlier than me as he had a World Cup opening match to attend. When I did board my flight from Sydney to Auckland, I was ushered into business class where once upon a time I would have indulged in Champagne and quality wine, but this time a comfortable seat with plenty of legroom and lashings of sparkling water were my little luxuries. Unbeknown to me, Angus (who Matt was staying with in Auckland) is friends with a Qantas pilot who had arranged my upgrade, adding to the completely surreal experience of arriving home. Time to eat some ice-creams and do some bombs.

A wedding & a final farewell

A key date that much of our trip pivoted around had finally arrived: the wedding of our good friends, Em & Jon, in Sweden. We would arrive in Stockholm on the Friday, attend the wedding on the Saturday, and spend Sunday night saying our goodbyes before flying back to London and out to Bangkok.

Many of our good friends would be at the wedding, including a couple who had moved to New York around the time we embarked on our travels, so the wedding promised to be a well-timed reunion.

We were taken by coach to the venue - a beautiful lakeside castle with various buildings that served as accommodation with areas set aside for dinner and dancing. There was even a sauna which got some use (interspersed with mad running jumps into the icy lake) at the end of the evening.

It was an absolutely stunning wedding, organised perfectly yet effortlessly by the bride and groom with myriad personal and fun touches. Jon is English so the Union Jack and Scandinavian cross flanked the castle on twin flagpoles. The table plan included photographs of all the guests with flags denoting their nationality. Menus were provided on personalised postcards, stamped with images of the guests, postmarked by country and written in the appropriate language. The food and wine were matched and were a blend of Swedish and British fare.

There were songs and laughter and wonderful speeches, culminating in the bride's surprise for the groom, a music video her brother had shot, starring Emma lip-syncing Take That's "Rule the World", invoking every love ballad cliche from sitting in a window gazing at a framed photo of Jon, through striding triumphantly along a deserted road, to spinning joyously in a field of daisies. Finally, they had "their song", a tongue-in-cheek gesture as Jon outwardly projects discerning taste in music but was outed by his new wife as harbouring a penchant for boy-band Take That and a secret man-crush on Gary Barlow.

Vic & Iain cutting fine figures

Who needs heels when there's a step nearby?

New-mum Mieghs back in her wedding dress

A mini reunion

NYC meets baby Vera

Must be looking at hypno-baby

Sunny & Matt: the original bromance

It was an emotional and bittersweet weekend culminating in a series of tearful goodbyes as we exited for the southern hemisphere.

Chavorca & Ibiza

What do you call a chav in a box? Innit. Most kiwis don't seem to understand this joke, but everyone who lives in the UK certainly does. And anyone who's visited Mallorca will know that in certain pockets (though I'm guessing not the ones Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones occupy) it should be known as Chavorca.

As we'd left it until the last minute and we were planning on spending five days in Mallorca avoiding carbs and alcohol, we'd booked a package holiday within 20 minutes drive from the airport for convenience - our rationale was: "How bad could it be?" and "Even if the food is really bad, it won't matter as we'll just eat less".

It turns out chavs aren't just made in the UK; Germany does a pretty good version of them too and in the summer they congregate at hotels throughout Arenal, just south of Palma. The flipside was that we spent the week doing exactly what we'd planned. The food was truly appalling so our diet went very well, there was a gym on site so we did plenty of working out and the hotel was hideous so we made a daily pilgrimage to a far-flung beach.

Chav-free Mallorca

I still wasn't feeling quite right and so decided it was time to investigate. In Spain, being pregnant is called embarazada, so I ventured down to the local farmacia, communicated my requirements in pidgin Spanish (German probably would have been fine, but instead of embarazada it would have been schwanger!) and bought a test. Two tests later and putting all potential language mix-ups aside, the results were virtually positivo: I was embarazada. Hurrah - so the detox was well-timed and would continue (for me at least) for quite some time.

Starting as he barely managed to go on

Our long weekend with friends in Ibiza was suddenly rendered a subdued tee-total affair for me. I'd always thought that the same deal applied to the first three months of pregnancy as being gay in the US military, but I was soon to discover that quite a few of my friends and associates don't subscribe to the unspoken "don't ask, don't tell" rule. In fact, for one individual (namely DJ Chutney from Putney) it was more "ask once, ask again, get drunk and keep on asking". Clearly me turning down a drink shook some friends to the very core of their beings.

My friend Sunny is a dentist and related a story about one of his patients who quit drinking. She came in for a check-up one day and he asked her how things were. A successful lawyer in her mid-forties, she told him she planned to give up booze. At her next appointment some months later, he asked her how it was going. "Oh," she said, "I'm drinking again." Sunny asked what had happened and she explained that she'd given it a good go, only to discover that if she wasn't drunk she hated her friends. They'd get pissed, talk about themselves and tell the same boring stories again and again until she realised she had to be drunk to endure their company.

For me? Agua con gas. Nothing to see here.

I've been to Ibiza a handful of times and it is always sublime - gorgeous weather, lazy days at the beach, long nights, good music, good food and good times. We'd rented a villa from a friend of a friend, which fell through at the last minute due to some issue with the plumbing - but we ended up with a very cool pad in Figueretes overlooking the bay to Playa d'en Bossa.

Into the blue

We headed straight to our favourite beach, secured our usual table and whiled away the day eating, drinking, swimming and indulging in our favourite past time: taking the piss out of Azom.

Ah! Comte

Blissed out on the White Island

All aglow at Cala Comte

That hat looks so much cooler flipped up like that

Dos cervezas

Nice seaweed chest hair

Unconscious belly-cupping has already begun

The days that followed were all spent in much the same vein at Sa Trinxa on Salinas and Blue Marlin on Cala Jondal and the evenings were spent in and around Dalt Vila at the usual haunts of Pastis, La Oliva and La Brasa.

Sunset at Blue Marlin

Who could resist?

One small discovery: I still love my friends when I'm sober, but when they are drunk their company would definitely be enhanced by a drink or two.

The sun goes down at Sa Trinxa

Midsummer in Sweden

Matt and I headed in separate directions from Bergamo with Ryanair: he was bound for his cousin's birthday-slash-farewell in London and I was dropping into Stockholm for my beautiful friend Emma's surprise hen party.

A midsummer wreath for the bride-to-be

Em's mum takes pole to the streets of Stockholm

The party had a midsummer theme, complete with a brunch of lovely Swedish food (oh how I love skagen - prawns and dill in mayo on toast), pole-dancing lessons and a party at a lakehouse where we gorged on seafood, drank schnapps, sang drinking songs, ate cheese, played midsummer games and capped off the evening with a sauna. Very civilised indeed. I was feeling slightly off-key all day so laid off the booze and took it pretty easy.

Schnapps o'clock

No lake house would be complete without a...

All set up for the wine and cheese tasting

Malin talks us through fermented grapes and milk

It was a wonderful celebration with so much thought and love in the planning and spirit of the day. The next day I flew to Mallorca via Barcelona to meet Matt for five days of detox before a hitting Ibiza for some debauchery with Sunny, Alex, Azom and Number1.

La Dolce Vita

Widely held as the best description of a hangover, I give you The Bonfire of the Vanities:

“The telephone blasted Peter Fallow awake inside an egg with the shell peeled away and only the membranous sac holding it intact. Ah! The membranous sac was his head, and the right side of his head was on the pillow, and the yolk was as heavy as mercury, and it rolled like mercury, and it was pressing down on his right temple… If he tried to get up to answer the telephone, the yolk, the mercury, the poisoned mass, would shift and roll and rupture the sac, and his brains would fall out.

“Something had happened last night. These days he often woke up like this, poisonously hung over, afraid to move an inch and filled with an abstract feeling of despair and shame. Whatever he had done was submerged like a monster at the bottom of a cold dark lake. His memory had drowned in the night, and he could feel only the icy despair. He had to look for the monster deductively, fathom by fathom. Sometimes he knew that whatever it had been, he couldn’t face it, and he would decide to turn away from it forever, and just then something, some stray detail, would send out a signal, and the beast would come popping to the surface on its own and show him its filthy snout.”

It wasn't that bad, but after four months of holidaying - which equates to four months of eating out three times a day and answering every question (dessert? drink? five-course lunch? fried breakfast?) with Why not? We're on holiday! - we decided that seven days in Italy would be spent detoxing. The injustice, we were entering the world's gastronomic epicentre only to deny ourselves all the wonderful booze, cheese and carbs on offer. 

We spent the first four days in Emilia Romagna, dining on scrambled eggs, espresso, Tagliata and grilled vegetables and drinking sparkling water. All were excellent, but really! 

We caught the high-speed train to Florence and joined the throngs of Americans clogging up every street and alleyway in the beautiful city. The Uffizi was closed for renovation and our plans to finally see Michelangelo's David - we'd only seen a replica at the V&A in London - were scuppered as the Accademia di Belle Arti is closed on Tuesdays. We ate gelato and wandered through the Boboli Gardens before boarding the bullet back to Bologna.

Firenze: serenity far above the madding crowds

The view from Boboli of Palazzo Pitti

Ponte Vecchio

Another replica David, but still no original

Not a bad beat

We were amused to read that renaissance artists such as Michelangelo sculpted small penises as they were deemed more "elegant".

Matt was eager for us to spend a few days on Como, our favourite spot in Italy since we'd first visited Bellagio in the summer of 2004. We went back a couple of years ago for my birthday and had a memorable meal of spaghetti vongole and rosato in Como town. I'd found an agriturismo online, which sounded perfect - overlooking the lake and surrounded by forest.

After a relatively quick drive on the autostrade and a few dead ends heading up a steep hill, we found ourselves on a near-vertical narrow dirt track hellbent on proving that our micro-rental was not up to the task. In the end, we gave up and turned back. There was no mention of access issues on their website, but even with a 4X4 only the most intrepid explorers could hope to reach the summit.

€70 a night for this billion-euro view

Hotel Glavjc in Torno

We drove on to Como town and found a hotel through the tourist office. After one night in a hideous modern hotel in the middle of an industrial subdivision half an hour south of the lake, we found a 70s monstrosity with billion-euro views clinging to the hillside between Como and Bellagio.

Lunch in Bellagio

We had lunch at the edge of the lake in Bellagio breaking our detox to drink rosato and eat pasta. It was glorious. Then we settled in at the Lido, a spot we'd discovered during our first visit to Bellagio. The owners of our campsite also owned the Lido, essentially a bar with a bunch of sun-loungers on sand beside the lake. It had been renovated since our last visit and was channeling Ibiza with its louche vibe, good music and white upholstered furniture.

Como's waters run deep at 400 metres to the bottom

Matt loves to swim and so was in and out of the lake as I lay on the sun-lounger contentedly reading a book. He asked me to swim with him so I ventured down to the jetty and furtively dipped a toe into the glacial water. It may have been August, but we were at altitude and Como is one of the deepest lakes in Europe so the water was far from warm. I backed up, telling Matt it was too cold for me. He blocked me and a relentless debate about whether I should or should not enter the water ensued.

It reached its pinnacle when Matt told me that I would regret it for the rest of my life if I didn't get in, which seemed very melodramatic to me. Then he upped the stakes and said that if I did a running jump into the lake, he would never ask me to do anything again. I retorted that he was a liar and that I have never been paid out for any of the countless bets I've ever made with him before impulsively running and jumping into the lake.

Bellagio's Lido

I can confirm that it was indeed very cold. Afterwards, I sat, leaning back against Matt, perched at the bottom of an unused slide suspended over the lake's calm surface. It was a spectacularly beautiful day - the sun shone from a cloudless sky, refracting off the still silent lake - and we both gazed happily across it. Somehow in the next few minutes, after some debate about the merits of marriage and utter confusion on my part as to what we were talking about, Matt proposed and I accepted.

A toast to our hypocrisy!

A bottle of Mumm was uncorked and we found ourselves engaged.