If there are positives to have come from Greg's cancer diagnosis – and weirdly, there are a few – then near the top of the list has to be how it has brought people together. It feels crazy to think that it was nearly 18 months ago that the Cavalry gig raised £25,000 for Give4Greg and brought together the Southampton music scene and old friends back into the fold. That night was a blur for me, like walking through a history of your own life; a cocktail of old boyfriends mixed with school friends, late night drinking partners of the past, family members and Delays fans I had met over the last decade.

Someone new I met that night was Emma Richardson of Band of Skulls but then I didn't see her again until recently. I was wondering around in a giddy daze outside the Nuffield Theatre after my TED talk when she grabbed me to chat and we realised quickly that we were absolutely were meant to be friends. We share the same love of art, fashion, music and dogs. Making a new friend as an adult is always spoken about as something that is hard to do but here's a strange thing about having cancer circling you like a buzzard - people either want to be really close to you or they want nothing to do with you. I have found making friends in the past two years easy, it's been the keeping hold of some old friends that's been harder.

Luckily, amazing people have been flooding into my life and with Emma, I get to not just talk about Greg and cancer. I get to feel like the old me that wants to chat about artists, 1930's fashion, the music industry and clubs we used to go to in Southampton. There is such a gap in my life in that regard, I feel so far away from that part of me that it's a joy to be able to expand my brain in these ways, so much so that I ended up giving Emma a full on spontaneous critique of her paintings on a visit to her exhibition at The Arches this week. Probably not what she wanted but she was very sweet in letting me bang on about art theory in a heat wave. The lecturer in me is not dead yet...

* Stacey Heale has left her career as a fashion lecturer to focus on her two lively little girls and fiancé, Delays frontman Greg Gilbert, who was diagnosed with stage 4 bowel cancer in November 2016. She launched the viral campaign Give4Greg to raise funds for lifesaving treatment: gofundme.com/give4greg. You can read more at her blog beneaththeweather.com