Put ten years on someone. What a difference. I've got a friend who, bluntly, has lived it large, more than large in fact: adventures with men, escapades with booze and other stimulants, brushes with the law. Pioneeering ladette behaviour before the term had left the first journalist's pen.

Not a Courtney Love kinda gal. Could have been breathing down her neck, though; thank God for the mundane, down to earth demands of mortgage, employment, car insurance, etc, etc. That tethered her a little more tightly to the ground than La Courtney. Whatever, my friend still has a heck of rousing track record. I call her Carousela

I'm meeting her on Sunday. These days, she's all so different. And Sunday, she's bringing over some of her home made jam before we spend the rest of the afternoon yomping through Wholefoods on Kensington High Street. Could never have envisaged this a decade ago. Tempus fugit. Yet for me, I feel like I've not changed at all. Still plodding on like one of those giant Galapagos turtles. But then again, do men ever change?