This article, Wonderful life of Brian, was from The Australian acouple weeks ago but is well worth a look. It's a piece written by Phillip Adams, and talks of the death of a close friend of his, Brian. Acouple of paragraphs grabbed the concept of friendship by the scruff of the neck and shook its importance into stark clarity, and it was these passages that affected me most. I hope my comments don't tarnish these perfect sentiments.

"... There were times when the friendship, like a marriage, seemed to have gone on too long, when it was running out of energy or relevance, but then it would come back, as strong as ever."

- It's frustrating how friendships can do this. They carry on of their own volition at times and in many ways you have to allow things to take their course, for good or bad.

"Like all old friends, Brian and I talked in shorthand. A word, a phrase, was code for this anecdote or that experience. With his death all that shared memory, the shared culture, the shared experience of time itself, evaporated. It's not only the present and the future you're denied by the death of a friend – it's more the richness of the past. It's the loss of yesterday as much as the loss of tomorrow that constitutes grief."

- Having to relegate those moments to the past, with no hope of being able to share them or add to them. To take a slightly different context, it has felt to me that each good-bye is a small death. I don't like good-byes, a "see you soon" is far more preferable.

"A friend is someone with whom you may think aloud. As the 17th-century proverb puts it, there is no better looking glass than an old friend. So when that mirror in which you see yourself is broken, when you no longer have that person with whom you were able to think aloud, that death is your death."

Thanks Phillip.