La Bella Luna.

At 4.44am, the moon wakes me up. She is shining wildly through my bedroom window, golden and full and urgent, as if she has a message for me.

I think, before I fall back to sleep: I must write this down.

Do you remember the film Moonstruck? It’s a glorious, slightly nutty film and I watched it over and over again in my twenties. People are always looking upwards and seeing the moon and saying, ‘La luna! La bella luna!’ The moon sends them all mad, in their ways. (It is, after all, where the word ‘lunatic’ comes from.)

There is Cher, being brilliant and looking absurdly beautiful. ‘I have bad luck,’ she says. At one point she slaps someone hard, twice, says, ‘Snap out of it!’ and then kisses them.

There is Nicholas Cage, chewing up the furniture in trademark Cage fashion. (I think this was in his pomp, when he was in Leaving Las Vegas, which was just about the most wrenching film of those years.)

There is Olympia Dukakis, absolutely romping away with one of the best parts ever written for a woman of a certain age. I still remember her melancholy, glittering eyes, slightly drooping at the corners with all they have seen.

Everyone is always making eggs and drinking glasses of champagne into which they have mysteriously dropped a sugar lump.

It is a family film - a film about la famiglia, at heart - and one of the stars is the family house, a great red brick barracks in Brooklyn, in the days before it was hip. (I remember going to New York in my youth and nobody even mentioned Brooklyn. Now all the cool cats live there and nobody can afford it any more and it’s been gentrified up the wazoo. I often wonder whether anyone real lives on the actual island of Manhattan any more, or whether it is like Westbourne Grove, which got turned into a hedge fund theme park, so that all the neighbourhood shops went - the newsagent and the post office and the ironmonger and the funny junk shop which had everything crammed in the window including a broken lamp at a crazy angle. I remember going back there once it got gentrified and the hedgefunders had moved in and it was all stratospherically expensive minimalist clothes shops and Mr Patel and his newspapers and his smile were not even a spectral memory and you couldn’t buy a hammer or a stamp. I think: is Manhattan like that, now?)

The greatest joke in Moonstruck was that there was an impossibly old grandfather who walked a rowdy pack of about six dogs and they would all go out at night and howl at the moon. ‘La luna!’ cried the grandfather, in wild and almost relieved delight.

I don’t think he spoke at all, otherwise. I think that that was his only line.

Anyway, that’s what I thought about when I woke at 4.44am with the dear old moon shining at me like a blessing and a memory.

And now the sun is shining and everything is silent, because the family is away, and I’ll type all this and then I’ll go out into Scotland and look at the hills.