No one is really listening to him though. Everyone is busy doing their own thing. A couple is looking into each other’s eyes over the high tea tray of sandwiches and cakes. In the corner is a group of men in suits huddled over a meeting.

A man’s talent reduced to background noise.

He finishes the last piece of the set, packs up, then walks past me. I nod at him and thank him for the song. His smile could probably be seen from the moon.

On the flight, I sat next to a young Frenchman. He’s got a book in French – one of those big yellow black handbooks – on Buddhism for novices. He’s also got a fat pack of documents with him. I peer at the papers, I can’t help it, my eyes are restless.

There are sketches of the human anatomy with lots of dots, dashes and arrows pointing to various parts. He tells me he’s taking a course in acupressure and acupuncture.

A man looking to hone his talent.

On the flight, I finished reading Nora Ephron’s “I Feel Bad About My Neck”. I’ve always liked her sense of humour, her wit, her quirkiness, her angst – she’s the one who wrote “Heartburn” and co-wrote the scripts for “When Harry Met Sally”, “You’ve Got Mail” and “Silkwood”.

She talks a lot about ageing in the book but she does it in a funny, wicked way. “Why do people write books that say it’s better to be older than to be younger? It’s not better. Even if you have all your marbles, you’re constantly reaching for the name of the person you met the day before yesterday.”

Reading her book reminds me why I love reading and what a good book can do to you. You go out and you can’t wait to get back to it. You get so involved in the story and characters you can’t wait to find out what happens to them. You long for that moment before shut-eye – if that’s when you usually do your reading – when you can be alone with that book.

Here’s what Ephron says about a good book, “There’s something called the rapture of the deep, and it refers to what happens when a deep sea diver spends too much time at the bottom of the ocean and can’t tell which way is up. When he surfaces, he’s liable to have a condition called the bends, where the body can’t adapt to the oxygen levels in the atmosphere. All this happens to me when I surface from a great book.”

Let me share with you some of what she says in the chapter, “What I Wish I’d Known.”

• Buy, don’t rent.

• Never marry a man you wouldn’t want to be divorced from.

• Don’t buy anything that is 100 percent wool even if it seems to be very soft and not particularly itchy when you try it on in the store.

• You never know.

• Anything you think is wrong with your body at the age of 35 you will be nostalgic for at the age of 55.

• At the age of 55 you will get a saggy roll just above your waist even if you are painfully thin.

• Write everything down.

• If the shoe doesn’t fit in the shoe store, it’s never going to fit.

She also talks about death in the book. “Here are some questions I am constantly noodling over: Do you splurge or do you hoard? Do you live everyday as if it’s your last or do you save your money on the chance you’ll live twenty more years? Is life too short or is it going to be too long? Do you work as hard as you can or do you slow down to smell the roses? And where do carbohydrates fit into all this?”

Incidentally, Ephron died a couple of months ago this year, aged 71.

A talent gone, but captured in words and wit.