Magda is not the only good friend I lost at a ridiculously young age. There was also Andy.

Andy was my best friend in the sixth form, and he had epilepsy. It was never especially well controlled, apparently, though I never actually saw him have a fit. And I'm fairly certain he knew it was going to kill him sooner or later, which explained why he was so remarkably mature; most of the boys in the sixth form still had, to put it as kindly as possible, a lot of growing up to do, but he managed it pretty early. He was that rare combination, a fine programmer who was also excellent with people; the other boys in the computer science group played Space Invaders on the Commodore PETs whenever they got the chance, but Andy didn't. So one day I asked him why not.

"Oh," he replied, "I got bored playing it after a while. I wrote it."

After a while his family moved away, and we kept in touch; we remained in touch through most of university, and in fact he came to visit me at university once (I put him up with my friend Huw, who was a fine Welsh eccentric, and they got on so famously that they stayed up talking into the small hours). But then we both happened to move house at about the same time, and lost touch as a result.

I tried to track him down, and eventually found him, some years later, living in Bedford; after a few years' stint working on an oil rig, which he'd thoroughly enjoyed, he was now working at Heathrow, where he was some kind of manager, having been promoted to that level because he was good at programming. Usually that's a disaster; not in his case. So he now had all kinds of aviation-related stories to tell me, especially about the accidents (rare) ane near-misses (more common than you might think), since he was the person whose desk they ended up on. He'd been rather quiet in the sixth form, but he had by now blossomed into a most entertaining raconteur.

I'd found him just in time. Within six months, he was dead.

It turned out he'd caught some unpleasant tropical fever on a work trip to Hong Kong which had put him in hospital for a couple of weeks, and after that his epilepsy went completely off the rails. He lived on his own, and what seems to have happened is that he felt unwell one morning as he was about to set off for work, went and lay down, and then had a series of repeated fits. His heart couldn't take it. They found him lying on his bed with his boots on. He was 33.

For years after that I had these really infuriating dreams in which he'd turn up. They varied a bit; sometimes he'd give me some quite surreal explanation of how it was that he wasn't really dead, sometimes he'd just take it for granted that I knew, sometimes he'd be as I remembered him, and sometimes - these were by far the worst ones - he'd act out of character. But, however exactly the dream went, I'd invariably wake up confused and annoyed. I didn't like my subconscious doing that to me.

Eventually, to my great relief, they petered out. I didn't get a dream like that for perhaps a couple of years... until the night before last.

And this time it was about Magda.