Today it's the funeral of our old friend Guy Kewney. 

Guy was a famous writer in the field of technology, and he is mourned not only by his wife and family but by many colleagues and readers too. But the fact that he was a bigwig in his industry and knew a slew of celebs meant diddlysquat to me personally.

We met when I became production editor on his magazine, back in about 1989 or 90. He was technically the editor in chief, but had zero interest in actually running a paper or managing people, preferring to remain a hack, nosing around for truffles. He'd been on holiday during my first week, but he strolled in, all bald, beard and sandals in week two and said: "From your air of general authority, I'm guessing you're the new production editor".

His desk was next to mine and for the next couple of years I tortured him every day with my chain smoking (which he hated passionately) and he got his revenge by making comments on every single thing I ever wore, once asking me as I trundled about the place if I actually had legs or only wheels.

He was, at heart, a total sweetie. When I got together with my (now) DH, he was very supportive at a time when disapprobation rained down on us from virtually everywhere else. One of the most unjudgmental people you could ever meet, he was a loyal friend, and he once told me I was the best production editor he'd ever met, which meant a great deal to me, especially at a place like VNU - a godawful company if ever there was one.

He also had an idea I might like to become the news or features editor but in this he was much mistaken, as I couldn't have cared less about IT, but at least he took me to lunch at L'Esgargot to get me out of the office (as a production editor, I didn't get away from my desk much...). 

Guy was always late with his beautifully written copy but never gave a stuff what I did to it - handing it over with total professionalism and then forgetting all about it and going on to the next article - probably (on our time) for another newspaper entirely.

He lived in a world so filled with paper that, when visiting him, the DH could barely find any floor space in his home office and had to pick his way like stepping stones on the odd bits of carpet that were visible. His friends swore that, one day, his skycrapers of ephemera would all collapse, leaving him buried somewhere underneath, along with the pile of dead technology he had managed to kill as soon as he came into contact with it. His work desk was surrounded by dead computers, with Guy somewhere in the middle, tapping away madly (something he continued to do under the table when seated in restaurants, recording entire conversations near-verbatim but out of sight). 

When Guy left VNU for Ziff, we lost touch rather, though I always knew what he was doing as we still worked in the same field. But I bumped into him later when freelancing at St Katharine's Dock, and he insisted on seeing me onto my bus safely in the dark, chatting about his daughters, who were growing up apace, and his wife, whom he positively adored. His last communication with me was to write something nice on LinkedIn, and the one before that was to run my picture through a 'prettifying filter' and then send it back saying it hadn't altered anything because I was too pretty to start with. This is not a compliment one receives often after the age of 40, so I took it with thanks.

During his last illness, he was preternaturally calm about not surviving to old age and his dignity in the face of his imminent death was positively inspirational to anyone who read his blog on the subject. In his last post on March 29, he described himself as content, with a sense of fading purpose, reducing energy, and withdrawal. He said he might have a couple of months of gentle recovery before the end, or a couple of weeks, with "fade to grey" as the final script directive. "Either way," he said, "I know my place ("bottom of page 94, sir!") and neither script is worrying me. Heck, I may even have a surprise!".

Sadly, he didn't even get those two weeks, dying just 10 days later at only 63, but thank God, he was able to die peacefully at home, surrounded by his family. Although Steve and I had been expecting the news, when it came, we were both more gutted than we could possibly have imagined.

We can't be at his funeral in England today, but this morning we bought a medlar tree and will be planting it in his honour, where I hope it will grow and flourish as reminder of him.  And we'll be thinking of his family and friends this afternoon as they make their way to Islington Cemetery. 

The DH and I were in a local town, Domfront, the other day.

Although a beautiful medieval city, Domfront is in a state of some disrepair these days, and we walked along a row of boarded-up shopfronts up the main drag to the chateau. In one shop, whose window bore a picture of a golden cat, was a notice for French lessons.

I really wish they would take this thing out, because it is in my friend Rianna's handwriting. And Rianna is dead. She died several years ago in a diabetic coma. Le Chat d'Ore was her shop, where she sold cat paraphernalia - cat lamps, cat statues, metal cats for the garden, marble cats for the house.  

It was a very strange sort of a shock when Rianna died. In fact initially I laughed and said: "What?" It seemed like some sort of joke. She was far too much of a force of nature to suddenly be gone.

But the more I thought about it, the less it was a surprise. Her husband of 20-odd years, Richard, had died only shortly before, after a long battle with cancer, and she'd been hitting the bottle pretty heavily ever since. Her diabetes wasn't controlled by diet, but by insulin - it was so bad, in fact, that she didn't even drive. 

It was one of her pupils who became worried when there was no sign of her at French lesson time and forced the grizzling Gendarmes to jemmy open the door. Rianna was found dead in bed. We all hoped she'd died in her sleep, though there's no way we can ever know. She was only 56 and as fit as a fiddle.

There's a crossroads near to our house that the DH and I call Richard and Rianna's crossroads, because one time we saw her cycling slowly up the hill (she was a local fixture on her bike and would bike 70km to an antique fair at the drop of a hat) and we pulled up to talk to her. It was then that she told us Richard had cancer. He'd had a fit and been rushed to hospital, and they'd found his lungs riddled with it. He was already terminal - the fit was probably from secondaries in his brain.

They expected him to die within weeks but he hung on for another four years, always denying that he had anything more than a cough. At times he was as mad as a hatter from the chemo - thought the dog was on television etc and that Rianna had given him crocodile sandwiches. He could only eat certain things, and at certain times, so we did them some Sunday lunches that were planned like a military operation. Chicken and chips served EXACTLY at one o-clock. The DH had to lift him in and out of the car, he was so weak, and afterwards dance around the house blasting out 'Lust for Life' until I stopped crying.  

Both Richard and Rianna were always difficult people - argumentative, touchy and rude. But you never doubted their intelligence. When he was still well, Richard was an aircraft engineer who spent most of his week in Paris, while Rianna - a former cartoonist for Punch - ran their three gites singlehanded and managed to piss off most of their customers, not to mention builders, gardeners or anyone else who worked on the property.

There was no-one in the district she didn't fight with over the years, and most of us were her friends, whom she relied on for all manner of heavy lifting, both physical and metaphorical. Once Richard became sick we were always over there moving him from gite to house and back again. 

Rianna was also in sway to a menagerie of animals, all of which she anthropomorphised like mad and looked after badly - all of them had lice or mites or something else dreadful wrong with them and she was always taking in yet more doomed blue-tits and crows, feeding them up and watching them keel over in front of her. When she sold the house, she begged me to take her wuvverly wabbits and only when they were on their way informed me that they all had contagious earmites. The DH put his back out lifting the concrete hutches and my name was mud for days. 

Rianna, being Dutch, also spoke four languages fluently and could swear like a trooper in all of them. Occasionally she used it on me, such as the time that out of the blue, she asked us to move the lot of them to Domfront to their new house THAT DAY. This was herself, Richard, four cats, three dogs and all their luggage.

"Sure," I said, signing away our Saturday. "Tinkerbell can go in our cat carrier and the other dogs can go in the back."

Tinkerbell was their vicious little ratter of a terrier who would not only go for you as soon as look at you, but had taken to defending Richard with her life if anyone even approached him. I had visions of him going for the DH whenever he changed gear. Rianna promptly accused me of cruelty, said Tinky-Wink was never to be put in a cage LIKE AN ANIMAL and hung up the phone. Oh la, I thought, but couldn't help smiling later when her cats escaped all over of the car of the sucker she'd landed, and damn near caused an accident.

Rianna could make me laugh my head off too, though. More than almost anyone else I've known. She always had some anecdote to tell and often it was against herself. Or if not herself, it was against Richard. Multiple courses of chemo and radio did nothing for his sunny temper and once they moved to Domfront, he was continually getting into scrapes with the local yoofs.

Once, only weeks before he died and he was as frail as a reed, Rianna phoned to tell me that she'd been called to the local gendarmerie, where Richard was in custody, in his pyjamas, accused of criminal damage. Incensed by the bikers revving below their tiny house on the Vue Panoramique, he'd gone down and pushed over all the bikes till they fell down like ninepins. 

For people that I considered friends but didn't really know all that well, I am always surprised by how much I think of them. I still have many of Rianna's cartoons, and I keep my salt in a soapstone pot she gave me. I have another that is home to my date stones, while we bought her buffet for our living room and although the colour is wrong, Rianna mixed it herself and I can't bring myself to change it. 

While Richard could still walk, he used to amble down to the bench at the foot of the old city and sit there with Tinky, watching the world go by. We'd often see him as we drove through, and whenever we pass the bench I see him still, though he's no longer there.

Rianna, meanwhile, I think of whenever we pass the vet's in Mayenne, where we rushed her one dead of winter night, clutching her dog Tess. We got there in time and the vet treated her, but Tess died the next day, succumbing to liver failure in the small hours.

And so it went with all of them in the space of just a couple of years - Tess was the first to go, then big Jem the Doberman, then Tinky-Wink the terrier. And then Richard. And then Rianna.