This is for one of my dearest friends, who lost her best friend on Saturday, and faces one of the hardest days of her life tomorrow.

I know how much your friend meant to you; I've heard it in your voice, glimpsed it in your eyes, and seen it so clearly in your smile whenever you mentioned her. Love, affection, friendship, it's all there.

I can't imagine how you must be feeling. What I can say is how much I'm thinking of you now.

I was in Dijon for most of last week, alternating between strolling purposelessly, (boulevarding, I think is the exact Gallic term) and trying to impersonate the impassivity of the French coffee drinker to the vie exterieure. The when in Rome thing, really

No passes on either score. Just not in my itchy nature to do...well...nothing. I need some focus, a book usually, a paper often, a friend when the occasion permits, but I can't just have nothing. How do they do it? And alternatively, is there anything in the Anglo-Saxon way of live they actually regard the same way we seem to do all of theirs?

I did n't think I was the only reader with this prejudice and I'm not. Philip Pullman has the same thought and the capability to articulate it better than I ever could

Autumn, and how do I know ? Throbbing toothache. Every Autumn, the moment the weather changes, clouds get heavier and moister, my wisdom teeth twang. How did I become a human barometer?

I've just been looking at a slide pack of photos of old Notting Hill.

Amazing does n't begin to catch it. The pocket of Notting Hill I call home is unrecognisable to what it once was. Totally. Like it's been carpet bombed, not once, or even twice, but repeatedly, and finally what remained, the dust, the broken walls, collapsed ceilings, shattered window frames, all of it stirred in some great blender and dumped back out. Not even the street patterns are the same.

So many shops too. We are vastly under-resourced today when it comes to the small shops, there's barely anything, stumps of teeth in a nearly empty mouth as it were. Then, and by the way, then is indefinable, I can't say the fifties, or the sixties, the set of photos, I've been privileged to see cover almost a century, the seams of the neighbourhood were almost popping, at breaking point, with places to shop.

Notting Hill teemed with life, oozed it, spilled on the streets and over on to the roads. It's like the Lower East Side must have been in the 1890s and early twentieth century. Not an inch of space.

I have a very good historical sense as I do an active imagination; even with those two attributes, I still find it close to impossible to picture in my mind how Notting Hill once looked, how it breathed with life. God, it must have been like Naples, people hanging out of windows, in vests, playing on the streets, loitering, walking, shopping, singing, drunk.

Darker evenings, colder evenings. We're moving into the time of year I actually enjoy. There's something ineffable about the long evenings; deep shadows, curious patterns of light, fascinating and mysterious. It's my Saturnine Capricorn side finding itself at home for once.

But there's nothing special about it when it comes to being button holed by a stranger at the bus stop.

Like tonight. A middle-aged, pot-bellied, greying man wandered into the bus stop I was stood at; asked if the model on the advert rotating one one side of the stop, was Kate Moss. She was n't.

Then, without missing a beat, he told everyone that every Brazilian who comes to London does so simply to open a shop.

I'm still trying to find the link between the two statements

This is the second night I've walked home past the restaurants that line Chiswick High Road and unthinkingly ended up studying the body language of some of the diners.

Two nights ago, I noticed one couple, and saw a fatal sign, the woman discontentedly fiddling with her necklace, twisting this way and that. No words need tell the state of that relationship; they will not sitting opposite each other in that restaurant, or any other this time next year.

Tonight, I glimpsed a woman, caught between a pucker and a grimace, painting her lips. For some reason, it struck me as particularly horrible. I can't explain why. It just did.

There's a version of the "As one door closes another..." sentiment going mini viral on the facebook sites of some of my friends.

The statement in questions reads thus: "When one door closes another opens, we often look so long and regretfully on the closed door that we don't see the one which has just opened".

Noble words. And so unlike the version a relative of mine prefers, which is "As one door closes, another slams in your face".

Evening rain on the skylight roof, and for some reason it's making me think that all over London, there'll be people like me agonising between wanting to write, or instead follow that other equisite joy: burrow into the sofa with a compelling book.

A reasonable night's sleep and enough courage to open a bank statement pretty much sums up my view of what makes up the good life. Hardly Montaigne,or Marcus Aurelius, in it's sweep, but what works for one does n't always work for another.