Letter from Simon Kelner

I don't know what more I can add to the millions of words already written about Amy Winehouse, but I can bring a personal recollection to bear.

Five years ago, I had dinner with the singer - flushed with triumph following the acclaim for her Back to Black album - for GQ magazine. Or rather, we didn't have dinner, as Amy refused to eat so much as an amuse bouche. She said that she was going to the gym later that evening, but her eager consumption of three glasses of champagne didn't suggest that she was heading straight for the exercise bike.

She seemed nervous and distracted, but was polite, engaging and disarmingly honest. She explained it was the formality of the surroundings that made her uneasy, but I quickly discovered the primary reason for her anxiety: she'd just had a bust-up with her then boyfriend, who had gone missing. Every few minutes, she looked at her mobile phone to see if he'd texted. She told me that she'd punched him when he tried to intervene in an argument she was having with another girl. "If I have 20 units, I can get violent," she explained. "Particularly if I'm unhappy. Apart from that, I am the model girlfriend." She said that she was "more like the traditional Jewish mother than my mum was. I love cooking for lots of people. A few of my friends even call me Mummy." She wanted to have lots of children, she said.

More urgently, she was desperate to bring our "dinner" to a close so that she could comb the pubs of Camden looking for her bloke. "I always get my man," she said, defiantly. But this brief encounter made a big impression on me: it is rare that we get the chance to see a meteor in such close-up. Over the weekend, I re-read the piece I had written in 2006. Of course, now it was laden with poignancy rather than the fascination it was at the time. She told me how she once saw a tramp polishing his shoes, and how this had melted her heart, but it was her parting shot, as she scurried off, that is so loaded with meaning today. "Every bad situation is a blues song waiting to happen." There's not a song blue enough for this situation.

Simon Kelner is Editor-in-Chief of The Independent, The Independent on Sunday and i