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Vikki Orvice’s last message, read out at her funeral at her village church in Hertfordshire
by her husband Ian Ridley

So Ian thought he had the last word.... Actually he finally will as he gets his turn in a few minutes.

It's slightly surreal planning your own funeral - and your own mother's too. I did worry at one point they would get muddled up. Given her musical taste differs somewhat from mine, if you suddenly hear the strains of one Shirley Bassey coming down the aisle then something has gone wrong! Still the control freak in me did at least get a say in the arrangements. 

But it’s also the first time I've not had to worry about numbers for a wedding or a Book Festival - have we sold enough tickets (the Book Festival not the wedding!), does the author like my interview, why isn't that microphone working, is the audience still awake...?

If anyone HAS turned up then thank you. I've asked Ian not to hold back in his eulogy as I know I sometimes didn't suffer fools gladly.

I think Private Eye's Street of Shame - a rite of passage in any journalist's career - once described me as "feisty" and "shirty". Well - no excuses - but it was only because I cared. Thanks though to those who stuck with me along the way.

I've had the most amazing life and being first diagnosed 12 years ago tends to focus your priorities so I was able to pack in trips to weird and wonderful places both through work and on holidays.

At my age you don't expect to make new friends either - as the cheery Sir Alex Ferguson once famously said, you only need six friends to carry your coffin. But I have - both up a mountain in Bhutan or in this beautiful village I moved to 14 years ago. 

My initial target workwise was to reach London 2012 - well I managed one more Olympics and let's face it, Rio with gunshot sounds in the background, was a survival test itself. In fact there were two Olympics without cancer and three with - not a bad statistic.

I know I've also not always done things the conventional way - though my step-daughter Alex has helped compensate for that - and when your father takes you as a kid to football in the 1970s and doesn’t bat an eyelid when you tell him you want to be a football writer, actively encouraging you to write for the fanzine, you suspect little is going to be conventional about your life.

Sheffield United though I fear are going to bottle it again. A whiff of automatic promotion and they crumble... 

On that note we don't want people to be sad today - the choice of music later might highlight this and what happens now is another adventure, another country to visit, a test of trust and hope.

So please try and remember the good things. And good things in your life too.

As for that offside rule.........I’m still working on it!  

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