I have been visited by every shade of grief and know that it doesn’t come in black or white.

People, not places, make a life whole.

We need the darkness to appreciate the light, and the bumps along the road to stop us falling asleep at the wheel.

I know I should have ignored her. I should have called. Many times I almost did. I got as far as picking up the phone. Sometimes I even dialed your parents’ number but then I wondered what I’d say to you. We had left it too long. How would we ever get around the silence, which was like an elephant sitting in the room?

I won’t say anything – and he won’t ask. That’s one of the great paradoxes of friendship between men. It’s like an unspoken code: you don’t start tunneling unless you hit rock bottom.

Sometimes friends do foolish things. My father told me that true friends are like gold coins. Ships are wrecked by storms and lie for hundreds of years on the ocean floor. Worms destroy the wood. Iron corrodes. Silver turns black but gold doesn’t change in sea water. It loses none of its brilliance or colour. It comes up the same. It survives shipwrecks and time.

I know the answer now, but I’m so frightened I’ve forgotten the question.

You’re scared of dying.’ ‘Better than being scared of living.

Some lids are best kept closed, glued, nailed, screwed down and buried under six feet of earth.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Oscar Wilde.