The sweet invisibility of middle age. I feel like my corporeal form is disintegrating any time I get near to a sales assistant in a shop.

I went into the menswear sections of several chain stores this evening. Other than one assistant commenting about my backpack, which I'd bought in his store a year ago, no one came near me. One even forcefully turned the other way as I walked by.

My presence is n't registered. Perhaps it is, but only the way a breeze stirs a ripple on a pond. A coat rack sways, or a cluster of shirts sighs and moves as something passes by. Invisibility, I've mastered it.

I heard David Norris, the garrulous cut-glass accented independent candidate for the Irish Presidency, use this assertion from Beckett.

In some way, it's more revealing of the candidate than of Beckett himself; there's a self importance and a conceit seeping through, which makes me thing Norris might be a liability rather than an asset to Ireland.

Nevertheless, it's the comment itself that matters: "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better".

There are times when it seems I've fallen through a tear in the time / space continuum. As evidenced twenty minutes ago when I flipped the radio on and heard Public Enemy's "Don't Believe the Hype" on Radio 2. The incongruity is almost impossible to articulate.

Radio 2 has had an edginess to it for years; Wogan, the great raconteur, has intellect by the bundle arm in arm with a charming naughtiness; Radcliffe and Maconie pushed the musical boundaries night after night, whilst there have been notorious flame-outs a la Jonathan Ross. Still, Public Enemy...

How to reveal a character by Tolstoy: "Drama, instead of telling us the whole of a man's life, must place him in such a situation, tie such a knot, that when is is untied, the whole man is visible".

I go to some parts of London, and these places are always in West London, with Chiswick the dark hub, and feel I should be having another kind of life to the one I actually have. That I should be really ferrying a daughter to Saturday morning ballet; helping a son with his backhand on the tennis court; wondering in the stone-flagged, island kitchen whether we should take a gite in France for the summer; or opening patio doors in the keen air of an early morning for a brace of dogs to burst across a deep lawn.

God knows why I should think like this. I am pretty content with what I'm up to. Certainly I have ambitions which I edge nearer to. All in all I'm content. So why does Chiswick, a notoriously pampered place, make me think my life is wrong?

We have celebrity politicians in this country, and when we don't have those we have those up to their ankles in the mire of some scandal. Pace Dr Fox right now.

Americans, on the other hand, have proper, serious politicians. Look at this clip of Alan Grayson, the former Democrat representative for Florida. I would vote for this man. Why can't British politicians be like this? The same fire, the same common sense, the same straight talk, the same compassion. I look across the florid cheeked ranks of the current British Government and not a scintilla of any of it evident.

With every finely honed action and comment, Mr Cameron, spins the axis of Britain ever further to the right. Today's speech about illegal immigration panders to the ever slavering tabloids' wettest dreams and pushes us as a nation towards very uncomfortable historical memories.

Today, he wants us to report illegal immigrants, or our suspicions of who we think might be one. A fine opportunity for grudges and grievances to be aired out for one thing; for another, its not too many steps away from having people wearing stars. I don't like this at all.

I want to be proud to be British. How can I when the government are weaving dark spells like this?

I'm part of the solar dust that lies on the fringes of London's art world. I have a little gig at a gallery each month which is why I feel I can lay claim to a little foothold, but really it's no greater than a few specks.

But my few specks have enough combined purchase to get me into one or two events, usually because I've been tipped off by a friend. Like yesterday.

The two of us sat in a British Museum auditorium listening to Grayson Perry, in his finery, a canary yellow embroidered coat with a serious pink blush lining, talk about his life as an artist and letting rip at the things he dislikes about the art world. Certainly sunk that old trope of the wounded, passionate artist stripped to the waist, furiously dripping paint on a canvas, in the small hours. That went straight to the bottom of the sea. No survivors reported.

He's quite a showman, but thank God, not in the queasy, toe curling manner of Jonathan Ross, or Clarkson. And in a strange way, nowhere near as self referencing as those two, even if he does dress like a apple cheeked five year old.

Other than the Beatles, Newton, and an alleged incident that took place in the Garden of Eden, then I can't think of any other Apple that has had the cultural and global impact of Steve Job's Apple.

Visionary is one of those terms that's too freely used, yet, in the case of Steve Jobs, it's truly deserved. He saw further than the majority of us ever will ; innovated in the simplest yet most technologically sophisticated manner; cast freshness and light over what had been a daunting market place; liberated people in endless ways.

A great man. A revolutionary. Sorely missed.

I mentioned in a much earlier post that in certain areas of London, memories pour out of the walls of buildings and ooze up from the very paving stones I'm striding over.

That sense roared back this evening. I'd been to Foyles on Charing Cross Road and was walking towards Lower Regent Street, when - and this may well have been provoked by a wonderful memoir of a man looking back at a youthful trip through Mexico I'd just finished reading - all of those ghosts of happy memories of my life in this wonderful city surged along the streets.

Streets and buildings that I'd seen twenty five years ago on similar fresh, clear October evenings, I saw again as the young man I was then.

What would have I done if I'd bumped into that young man I was then this evening? So easy. Hugged him, and then told him I loved him. Loved him for being him, for being adventurous, for accepting that life would often be solitary, but when it was, that the quietest moments were so often the most exciting, and to never give up, to keep going, to push on.

A couple of weekends ago I went on an epic walk through London with a great friend from L.A.. We covered all points well known and many more not so.

One of the pit stops was the chocolate boutique that operates out of Harrods. It's not called that, but the conceit is all there; everything is hand-picked by amazingly attentive assistants, and artisan is the name of the game, bespoke, wild, inspired creations.

My friend and fellow choco-fiend bought some chocolate that had surely slipped the surly bonds of normal hand made chocolate. This stuff was beyond divine. In another galaxy.

I had that Florence moment that ultra-sensitive tourists are reputed to have the instant they get anywhere near the place and drop to the floor insensible. Knocked out cold by the the sheer emotion of it all. Except I could n't swoon. Being a man, for one thing, and a cheek by jowl crowded shopfloor for another.

Her words are much finer than mine in summing up the rapture these love-bombs produced, This article in the latest edition of the Morton Report. (Yup, that Morton...)tells it better than I could ever hope for.

It's incontrovertible that I am London's greatest chocoholic in human form and that my word is final on all matters chocolate; there's no question about the nirvana status of the cassis and hibiscus dark chocolate. I attest to that. Bluntly they rock...

Regrettably due to eye-watering expense, this will be an unrepeatable experience, and perhaps it's better that way, the memory crystallised, the fear of the next set not being quite as good as the revelation generated by the first. This is also why I've never re-read Wuthering Heights; I can't dare think it might be flawed.

Nonetheless, I regard this experience with the contentment and satisfaction one might feel looking at a cloudless Everest. The chocolate peace that passeth all understanding.