More than anything, I want to talk to you about a friend who’s just died. I want to do it and I need to do it and I’m not going to, not this week. Not when I believe there are friends and I know there are colleagues of hers who haven’t heard yet.

It’s not as if I expect them to be reading this but if the possibility is tiny, still the risk is too great and it is magnified by the fact that she took her own life. I type that and yet again I’m thinking no, I’m wrong, it’s a mistake, she can’t have done.

And then I am looking at you right now but I’m also seeing her the last time we had a coffee, the last time I worked with her.

It’s just so difficult to think of anything else. I started the week at the Writers’ Guild Awards and, oh, there can surely never have been a more happy event – at least since last year’s one. A joyous, bouncing, happy room. I wasn’t up for any awards yet there were some results I actually cheered as loudly as if they had been for me.

Funny, you try to go far away from the topic that’s on your mind and sometimes you’re just heading toward the same thing in a different way.

For I told you I wasn’t up for any awards. That did make for a relaxing night, but sitting there, surround by a couple of hundred of the finest writers in the world, it made me feel that I wasn’t doing enough.

And my friend is never going to finish writing the book we talked about.

We don’t get long here and if we’re fortunate enough to know what we want to do, we need to go do it now.