Dear Sahir,

Thought about you last night.

We went to see Devendra Banhart at the Forum in Kentish Town, part of north london. The man seems too long and narrow to have a voice of such astonishing depth. He's a warbler, and a fantastic one. A charismatic fellow, he's as charming when he's mumbling into the mic as when he's speaking clearly. Quite boyish in speach, which belies the beard and the 70s rock-star hair. Anyway, that he's thin as a rail isn't the only reason i thought of you. Missing the times when we could sit down daily and listen to music in the wooden sanctuary of your Burlington flat. Caroline turned to me and said she hopes we don't have a flashback - it was Devendra we were listening to that night at yours post-graduation. "That would be amazing," i thought.

Lot's of music to see in this town. Last week it was Chemical Brothers and Justice (the latter the better) - see photo. I know it's no different from New York, but the endless possibilities for a night out can be paralyzing.

Instead of the NY Times Sunday edition, we get the Guardian (£1.50) on Saturday or The Observer (£1.70) and we read it at breakfast for the rest of the week. There was a funny column this week (in the Sunday Telegraph, actually) from Oliver Pritchett, writing about "'probability forcasts,' so that weather presenters avoid getting things wrong...temperature charts would be replaced by charts showing 'possible' temperatures":

"Good evening, and it's a very mixed bag with the weather outlook today. As you can see, we've got these question mark symbols over a large part of North-west England where, sticking my neck out, the winds could be fairly brisk-ish.

For North Wales, thunderstorms would be a pretty good each-way bet. Scotland, as usual, is anybody's guess. In South-east England we've got a lot of those arrows moving in from Devon and Cornwall, so by midday you should be seeing a lot more arrows here and along the South coast. The pollen count will be, you know, comme ci comme ça.

"That's about all I have to say about the weather, but, as you know, BBC Weather has now taken over the functions of the Office for National Statistics, so now we can look at the wider picture. First, I'll deal with the population of the United Kingdom. As you can see on the map, we've got this ridge of high population moving towards us from Eastern Europe.

"I think this will break up before it reaches us or drift away into the North Sea, although you may get a few scattered Slovenians in East Anglia. And if you live north of the Wash and you're going out today, it might be a good idea to take a Polish phrase book with you....

"If you go to our website, weatherbbc.co.uk/whatever, you'll see we've got some new figures from the Department of Education - which calls itself something else these days. A reasonable percentage of pupils passed GCSE maths and several handfuls of children (that's pretty big hands, remember) can read by the time they leave primary school compared with last year's figure, which was comparable to the population of a fairly large town in Austria.

That's probably quite good news. So, if you're going out today and you have a daughter aged 10, it might be a good idea to buy her a book. The Government has announced that it is investing squillions of pounds in school buildings. (Alex Deakin may have already announced this three times in earlier bulletins.)

"Crime figures now. This year a fair number of people have been victims of muggings, compared with quite a few last year. So, if you're going out tonight it might be a good idea to stay at home.

"Now, let's look at the Health Forecast map. It's a pretty grim picture here with these little skull-and-crossbones symbols sweeping in from the North-east, bringing with them lots of ever-so nasty illnesses, then they collide with these symbols, which are not puffy clouds, but little obese people. And over here, there's a scattering of persistent flu viruses. So, if you're going out today, you've got a roughly one in four chance of coming back alive."

Sounds fairly similar to the forecast in our country. Things aren't so different.

On an up-note, the weather today is actually very Septemberish. I had the french doors open at breakfast.

Hope you're sleeping well, my friend.