Fame abounds with ironies. I suppose that at least in the short term, we'll hear more about J.D. Salinger now than we ever did when he was alive.

I'd never thought about what the newscasters were actually saying. Probably decades of conditioning anaesthetised me and everyone else to it. How depressing.

Still, could be worse, could be the Daily Mail's version of reality, where there is no good,no hope, not even the tiniest glimmer of light, only misery, self loathing, and fear of anything from outside the Home Counties.

Urban predicaments. The first in an occasional series.

I met a friend by chance in a local bookshop this evening, who amongst other things told me about his current 'situation' - he's sharing a sublet flat with a woman, whilst the actual tenant is overseas. So far, so good. Sub-letting is a fact of life all over London, after all.

Earlier this week, they started to smell gas in their flat, so out went a call, and in response, in came British Gas, who said they would need to do a lot of work to repair the problem, so much so in fact that they had to turn the supply off and provide emergency heating.

That's enough of a predicament on it's own; being unable to properly wash, cook, or heat, would send me spinning.

But there's a further twist: the flat he's sharing is in a Women's Co-op, and men, apparently, are n't seen as fixtures and fittings. They do things, repairs, deliveries, then go.

People living in London, probably never see their neighbours from month to month, or in some cases, ever; and as he's sub-letting anyway, the chances of him finding he was living in a Women's co-op, were never going to be high to begin with. It only came out when the residents held some sort of open meeting to discuss the lack of gas supply.

He now not only has to pretend that he and his flatmate are only looking after the flat until the actual resident returns, but that he and his female room mate are a couple which would be straightforward enough, except he's gay. After twenty or so years out of the closet, he's now temporarily back in.

There's no greater Francophile in the UK than me - I love the place - but even I cloud over with fury about this - the real history of Haiti.

This demands the widest audience. It's a miserable, wretched story. Deeply upsetting. If nothing else, then at the very least - the very least - there's moral compensation due here from France. Preferably, they do the right thing, and restore everything they've effectively strong-armed out of Haiti

Without doubt, there'll be other countries, my own especially, that have equally unquiet memories, and just as many skeletons tugging at cupboard doors.

Being a city of eleven, or even twelve million, it's reasonable enough to run into someone who will remind you of someone you already know.

I'm getting that sensation virtually daily; there's an American who goes to the vegetarian takeaway that I do, who is nearly the body double for a young Michael Caine, even down to the thickish back-rimmed Get Carter like spectacles he's always wearing.

Whether that's a studied gesture or a careless one, I'll leave to the Gods to decide, or him to 'fess up to. But it's certainly disorientating to be standing at the counter with young Alfie in front.

An enthusiasm is a joy, a love of something, for something, it's excitement, happiness, that ineffable sweetness of pure enjoyment.

An addiction, my God, is another beast, it's a monster, pure and simple. Enthusiasms add shine to life; addictions consume, corrupt, eat from within, completely unhealthy.

I'm wondering if I'm a 'net addict. Online unfailingly every evening, which is bad enough, but that's nothing to the frustration I've been undergoing this evening, and a lot of other evenings this month, struggling to connect.

So sad to hear that Bill McLaren, the legendary Rugby commentator has died.

Blessed with the vocabulary of a poet, the voice of a biblical prophet, and the enthusiasm of a youngster waiting up all night for Father Christmas.

There was a gorgeous tribute to him in today's Guardian, peppered with some of his commentary classics. Name any other sports commentator who could sketch in a few, simple words the immensity of one player, by saying he was "...a great big sheep farmer who carried the ball in his hands as though it were an orange pip"

Then there's this: "...he tackled like the crack of doom and he could sniff a scoring Chance like a forest animal". It's Byronic and evocative, utterly above the mundane tripe most Sports commentators drip with.

Someone, I hope, will be busily pulling together an anthology of McLaren's commentary. Deserves to happen.

I went to Cornwall for a long weekend, and the weather was just extraordinary, virtually scorching yesterday, but on Friday, there was a monumental storm, lashing waves, sea spray, thick rain, and high winds throughout the evening and long into the early hours. It was elemental. I have n't seen Nature so incensed, so powerful anywhere that I've been to. It was almost an exhibition of contempt for a very puny Mankind. I felt humbled, and minutely small, insignificant, a fly speck before it.

The pounding waves kept flicking pebbles of all sizes over the seafront, effortlessly. To have headed into the storm and risked that cannonade would have been madness. Either brained, or torn off the sea wall by very angry waves and into a boiling sea. Nightmare.

Then there was the darkness; not just darkness with the hint of light, but a utter blackness, a void, that sucked in any light and never to release it. I was too timid to walk into any of it.

The allure of fine writing is, for me at least, the fact that it is transportable, either as a self contained excerpt, good for all weathers, or that it can be used to describe something other than it's original.

Coming out as an example of the latter, is this wonderful snatch I filched from an Observer interview with Jonathan Lethem: " What the reality of New York is this....(an)...overwhelming chaos of lives that are parallel but not touching".

That's London, Berlin, Paris, Buenos Aires, Cairo, Tokyo, every megalopolis, beehive city, where we know our neighbours only by the colour of their front door, or cooking odours.

What I have noticed during this extreme cold spell is the lack of bird song, and bird life in general. It was the exception of hearing a few birds chittering this morning that struck me; normally, it's like an airport outside y flat window; constant take off, landings and plenty of bird song.

It's not only the abrupt cessation of bird-song that's marking the sharpness of the weather, there's clear evidence of inter-species conflict for food. A friend told me yesterday how he'd watched blackbirds squaring up to pigeons in his back garden.

Little known fact, and one that has even less value (well, none, really), but I'm unable to resist it: London's film and TV community are in the main, dark-haired. Black, blue-black, brunette, deep chestnut, even mocha, that seemed to be as wide as the hair colour spectrum went if my scan of the audience at tonight's preview showing of The Road is anything to by. Barely a blond anywhere.

Yep, another cold day. Bitterly so, and will be for the next couple of days, maybe even some snow to boot.

I like cold, it's under-rated, makes you focus, keep an eye peeled for black ice, sidestep the slush, that kind of thing; then there's nothing like a warming, heart-pumping, brisk fifteen minute walk to the Tube in the morning. From synapse to synapse, everything is awake, nerve receptors, the whole kit and caboodle, right down to the cellular level.

But, my secret joys are n't exclusively meteorological; there's still the perennial pleasure of coming across a nugget of fine prose, which happened today.

Turning the pages of Harvey Swado's short story, Nights in the Garden of Brooklyn, on a half empty Hammersmith and City line tube this evening, I fell over these lines of his about New York: "...an indelible part of my young manhood. And like everything else I endured in those passionate years, it will remain until the end of my days embedded in the very core of my being, an internal capital, aflame with romance..."

I understand exactly; this is the effect this great city I live in, London has over me. Like a moth dazzled by a flame. Impossible to ignore, inconceivable to forget.

Another in a series of bone chilling days, and one where I was reminded via something I heard earlier on the radio of Pandora's Box, the mythological source of all the world's ills.

Pandora, apparently, could n't resist taking a peek into the sealed jar she carried with her (it became a box after a mistranslation), and out flew all the miseries and evils that plague us today: famine, pestilence, war, gloom, fear, and so on.

Except, there was one virtue mixed in with the maelstrom of vices: Hope.

I realise that at this point I could end up sounding like one of these avowed super positive thinkers It will get better. Think your way to success. All those mantras that seem to sell books by the lorry load. But the fact is I'm really not. There's a thick seam of doom and gloom running through me. Yet, bizarrely, I take comfort that Hope can survive whatever the host environment is.

New Year's Day should always be the way it was today: achingly cold, but bright, clear, and sharp. Bob cap pressed well done over my ears, I walked along the Thames to Richmond, idling the hours away, watching the buddha like herons seemingly meditate by the water side and the vapour trails of the ubiquitous parakeets sizzling through the tree tops.