Outside the French sun is intensifying by the hour, and wisteria, its buds as soft and delicate as kittens’ paws, has appeared overnight. On a murmuring television in a nearby room, pictures from another land, show grim-faced politicians walking mute from yet another emergency cabinet meeting.

A man called Johnson has been allowed licence, by a newspaper which has lost its moral compass, to spew further lies and ribald comparisons over its front page.

Parliament readies itself for yet another defiant message from the Prime Minister; a woman whose moral compass has also been lost in her pursuit of her Holy Grail.

But I am no longer part of this for now.

I am no longer the woman who makes the ‘ooft’ sound on rising or berates that same television in the absence of other humans.

Not the woman who still looks for signs of herself in a face that has taken on a different, disturbing form. Still hopes that the night will have wrought a miracle and returned me to me.

For I have disappeared back to the past – to youth, to my late teens and 20s.

Memories and long buried or lost feelings have poured in with an intensity I can barely believe…or bear.

But I welcome them as long, long forgotten friends who’ve suddenly appeared to wrest me from my solitude and remind me of who I used to be and who I hoped to be.

I remember other suns warming up a window seat where I lay, book in hand, dreaming/hoping of all to come.

Remember, and can feel, the jersey of the ‘hot pants’ I wore with thigh high socks and buckled shoes. See the midi-coats that served to double the shock of the mini-skirts and dresses I adored.

Even touch and feel the swish of my long blonde, so straight hair.

Faces rush past me; flashes of parties and dancing wildly, filled with the exuberance of life itself.

Like flicking through a rediscovered photograph album, I see a smiling face and think: ‘Oh God, I’d totally forgotten him/her. Oh, remember when we all…..’

I even hear chatter, like birds chirping in a just too far away tree but above all I hear laughter; unthinking joy.

The key that has opened up all these emotions is a voice now playing as I write, with unwanted tears filling my eyes as certain notes are hit, certain lyrics repeated.

The death of Scott Walker (Engel) was announced this morning and although some celebrity deaths may touch me for a moment, none has had such an impact.

Perhaps because he, with the Walker Brothers were part of the background to my teenage years; my bewildered yearnings of ‘something’ focused on the beautiful blond boy with a baritone made of strands of honey and steel.

Or perhaps because for a handful of years as he struggled with fame, drink and drugs, I became an acquaintance; a professional acquaintance, surprisingly given the odd interview as he strove to disappear.

Obituary: Scott Walker, singer-songwriter who turned his back on pop

Perhaps he found this trainee Buddhist/existentialist unthreatening and ‘sympa.’ I don’t know but was grateful for his time and, as always, the copy.

Too young, too naïve, to fully comprehend his demons, I was there in his dressing room in a Manchester club he thought would smother his stage fright.

His then-manager prowled in and out always guarding his prize, and Scott squandered his talents on back numbers and easy options for a half-cut audience.

There in the wings of the ABC Blackpool, knowing from yet another dressing room conversation he was ready to tip, when he broke down mid-way through Black Sheep Boy and walked off stage into self-imposed exile.

When he re-emerged several years later it was with deep, complex, multi-dimensional works which many would hail as genius. I never saw him again nor sought him out for interview.

But his voice still formed my backstory as my own life grew more complicated, more painful at times; sometimes richer in its depth, sometimes not.

A few years back I watched a rare television interview with him and shocked myself at my recoil from this old, now rather unattractive man with nothing of the golden boy left.

His music no longer reached or touched me and I felt a vague anger that he’d changed.

But of course, the anger wasn’t just at him for aging. It was anger for spoiling my memories.

Today all those memories returned intact. All that emotion that music above all brings us, returned intact.

For Proust it was taste – for me it’s a chord; opening bars; a baritone who never knew his worth; a run of words that break the heart or notate the heartbreak.

It’s a melody faintly heard and vaguely thought of – a tune one’s mind strives to place in a long life.

And now I’m back in the present and ready to turn to Parliament TV.

But for a time there…..

RIP Scott Engel.

Thank you.