I know it’s a pretty crappy shot for all sorts of reasons and my “excuse” is the wine bottle count on the table and the time on the exif. To be fair, the wine bottle tally wasn’t just Arturo, DM and me, there are two other friends out of shot – Bill and Carlotta. Bill rang me a couple of days ago asking if he and Carlotta could spend the weekend with me and because of my looming assignment deadline, I was thrilled and terrified in equal measure.

DM tried to persuade me to cancel because of my workload but I’m so stubborn that I have to have some kind of life of my own outside of the gruelling pressure of this course. He said “they will understand if you cancel and won’t mind – they’re good and true friends and they’ll just come another day”. I replied (through tears) “you don’t understand – I MIND – I mind never having an evening off. I mind never getting a weekend without work. I mind being a drone. I am NOT cancelling an unexpected visit by my friends however bad things are."

I hadn’t made it home from work when they arrived and DMs heart fell as he saw a strange man climb out of Bill’s van. He thought that they’d brought some random stranger with them. As soon as he was introduced to Arturo, he realised that he knew the name because I talk about him sometimes so he realised that Arturo is a friend of mine. Arturo has just handed in his dissertation (yesterday) and needed to get out of the city and blow away some cobwebs so Bill and Carlotta brought him along with them. He's a year behind me because he did a placement year working in a rainforest in Peru last year!

Arturo is from Rome, Carlotta is from Naples and I had the audacity to cook them pizza. Yep – how mad is that? You get two bona fide Italians in the room and you feed them their national dish cooked by a mongrel like me. I must be bonkers. The cheek of it aside, I did it and they both agreed that they were fab pizzas – thanks to the new “Pizza Pilgrims” method of cooking. Even Carlotta, who is a self-declared pizza despot, declared it to be excellent. Yay.

Just before midnight, I was scrabbling around looking for camera, flash and memory card for a photo and, despite its shortcomings in the skill department, love its reflection of my day. JD has adopted Arturo as his very own bestest friend and has barely left his side all weekend.