Tick, tick, tick...another year drawing to a close. So to that hardy band, that small but perfectly formed group who drop by my blog, happy new year and best wishes for 2012. Let's take it by storm and give it all we've got.

After ten years of trudging past Julie's on my way to Holland Park station and the office, I finally went in this afternoon. Everything I imagined about it realised the instant I stepped in with a friend; unobtrusive, almost butler-like service in gorgeously furnished rooms.

We were on the first floor sat on reclaimed and beautifully restored church pews surrounded by taste with a capital T. Opposite us was a horse shoe shaped alcove where four young Irish mothers, each clearly fashionable in that effortless way that affluence brings, and all in some way, shape or form, involved in something creative, were holding a birthday party for one of their daughters, a shy, brunette, who beamed when a birthday cake appeared and the table serenaded her with happy birthday.

It was quite glorious in a way I can't exactly articulate.

The ambience of Julie's is intoxicating; relaxed, arty, comfortably déshabillé, and timeless. No difficulty in imagining Harold Pinter, or a Rolling Stone or two, maybe Hitchens and Amis junior, or Stella McCartney holed up somewhere in this honeycomb of amazingly dressed rooms. I could, I can, see it so easily

I know there's more than a hint of Hyacinth Bouquet, snobby aspiration in other words, streaming through what I've written. But I loved this place.

I would have written far more this month except that I'm still honeymooning with my iPad. At some point the intensity of the infatuation will dim. It has to. Don't they all. But right now, I'm still enslaved, albeit joyfully, to this exquisite delight.

Just the pleasure of stroking the screen is enough to get me purring. I can't help it. I simply can't.

Yesterday did n't go the way I'd originally planned and I had to make some abrupt changes, otherwise my wheels would have stayed spinning in the mud; nevertheless there were compensations, small rewards, really, and there was an insight.

For the sheer need of seeing people, I walked from my flat through Kensington, along to the Edgware Road, and eventually on to the West End.

The closer to the West End, the busier the streets; Holland Park was a near tomb, scarcely a person, nothing open except for the solitary lighthouse that was the Windsor Castle pub, with just a scattered handful of drinkers

Kensington High Street was marginally busier with a small grocers open, then further towards Kensington Church St, Cafe Concerto was a sardine can of tourists, clearly relieved that at least somewhere was open. Not a table free.

After there, I headed through Kensington Palace Gardens and eventually to Queensway, the de facto beginning or end, depending on which way you're approaching, of Arab London. The London that never closes essentially and from there till Marble Arch, London fair hummed with life: cafes, restaurants, arab grocers, supermarkets, pharmacies, even a brace of hair dressers, were open.

Edgware Road, which is the passagiata for London's Arab community, spun with people, they were everywhere, at outdoor tables smoking shisha pipes, shopping, laughung, walking arm in arm eating, queuing for restaurants. It was a marvellous sight, like a latter day modernised 1001 nights. I was entranced.

I mentioned a number of small compensations: a polychromatic Jay, that I saw darting across a Holland park side street, and then later on the trek home, a fox scampering out of a garden near Queensway. I love the sense that the wilderness has n't quite left London. There are still echoes if you listen hard enough.

The insight? A woman. possibly homeless, probably friendless, reading a several days old paper in a fast food restaurant. James Baldwin described his protagonist in Another Country, as one of the "flattened", where the common denominator is quiet desperation, nameless torment and silent misery, not just on one day, but every day. London, like New York, the setting of Another Country, has too many of the "flattened". This woman was one. People should n't be falling through the cracks.

For reasons that I'm loath to talk about publicly, I've been far longer at the margins of my physical, and more importantly, emotional strength than I have been for a long, long time. Too many storms, too few ports to ride them out in.

It's been the comforting, inner world of books, the balm of words really, which have steered me away from the less pleasant side of introspection and it's cousins, anxiety and worry. I'm a firm believer in the benefits of the long dark nights of the soul; they're there for a reason, we all need to review and rethink. Life's not static and we can't be either.

Sundays and introspection. There are times, too many for my liking recently, when one is not without the other. So, I thank serendipity that I fell over these words of Samuel Johnson a few minute ago: "If solitary, be not idle. If idle, be not solitary" I've been both for several days and idle thoughts especially at such a heightend season as Xmas are not pleasant.

I got some of my mojo back - a smidgen, more has come back since I read those words of Johnson - wandering through the Freud Museum in Finchley. Parquet floors, steaming light, acres of book cases, the smell of floor polish, all are intellectual catnip to me. The sensory side of creativity and intellectual endeavour that I yearn to be part of.

I can't be alone in realising that the same books, the couch, and the row upon on row of Egyptian, African and Asian antiquities that I saw were also seen by someone who had such a seminal effect upon western cultural thinking as Freud. Remarkable and very moving.

That day has come. Christopher Hitchens, that monumental man of letters and instructive, almost edifying contrarian, is dead.

I've spent most of the evening reading the deservedly generous tributes that have appeared in the immediacy of Hitchens death. The finest, as it was with 9/11, was from Ian Mcewan. Endearing, warm, sensitive, a fine summation of a life lived well from a dear friend. Quite moving.

In some ways, Hitch was the Keith Richards of writing; prodigious talent, unstinting hard work (surprised I say that about the louche Stones guitarist? The ease and fluidity that he shows every time he plays did n't come without work), the love for what they do, that utter zest for life, the drinking obviously, but even down to their shared determination to live life at both ends and fain sleep.

If there ever is a Mount Rushmore of essayists and belle-lettrists then save the western aspect, the one that absorbs the bounty of the sun, for Hitch. I'll miss him.

I've been listening with half an ear to a radio programme where the presenter has been fluttering around the dissection table of a London hospital mortuary.

I'm left with two images, both opposing: the flensing of whales that I once saw on a programme about the Faroe islands, carcasses hauled on to the beach, sliced open, and the skin pulled back exposing innards and steaming ruby red blood; the other image, and this is driven by the home counties earnestness of the senior pathologist guiding the presenter across the extraordinary landscape of an opened up corpse is the trainspotter like enthusiasm of it all. The attention to detail is outstanding.

London, this battered, bruised, yet always juicy plum of a place, is alas never quiet. Sound leaks in as insidiously as draughts do in the bleak winter evenings. Where I am now in pleasant, affable Chiswick, I can hear the distant surf-like roar of the High Road, a gurgling fridge freezer, a hot water pump, and next door, a brace or so of drama students, who've been badged as the kids from Fame, practicing arias.

London, as I once wrote of Saigon, is an unfinished symphony of noise. If nothing else, noise is other people, who are n't necessarily hell, just misguided and unthinking.

In London the saying goes that you're never more than a few yards away from a rat. In the three decades I've lived here, I've seen just a handful; usually something slipping through the bushes in some suburban park, or once and more memorably, a large great rat hurrying across an empty Gerrard street one early morning.

So that's my experience of this assertion, and it's the way I want to keep it.

With people in the writing business however, and I include myself here, slightly because I do write, but more so because I'm a reader - a serious, heavy duty one - and the two of us need each other, I've found that you're never more than a few sentences away from a "why we write..." statement.

I'd be absolutely disingenuous if I said I did n't read them; I do, I gobble them up, page after page. And I know why. One word: reassurance. Their expressed motivations, have I got them? Have I got the writer's DNA ? What they're saying compels them then is it compelling me ? Am I writing because I feel powerful and blissful in my imagination as one of my writer friends says he does? Is it an impulse that I can't close the door on? Is it bemusement and amazement at this inestimable complex thing called humankind? Or the fun of the unobvious question: just what had that old bath I saw two workmen tugging out of the front door of a Holland Park grandee's house been privy to, for instance.

Why indeed do we write, why indeed do we read?

I'm just settling into my month long sabbatical in Chiswick - relatives have absconded to Australia for the whole of December. New twist to this bout of house sitting; there are two lodgers as well now. So it's elderly old me and two young women in their twenties. All the makings of a sit-com ...