Down here in south-west France our bizarre summer is drawing to its idiosyncratic end. It poured all May and June and now for the past few weeks it has vacillated, almost daily, from blazing heat (38C) to autumnal, not to say hivernal, chill. And still more rain. Last year at this time it was a parched, sepia landscape. This year it looks like late spring - lushness, greenness, all-round fecundity.

One of the strange associations the end of August always brings to me is the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. I was here in France on August 31 1997, when I heard the news - but so what? Where were you? These tentpole events of contemporary history - the Kennedy assassination, the murder of John Lennon, Lockerbie, 9/11 - easily stimulate the memory bank: we know exactly where we were and what we were doing. Now that the 10th anniversary of the death of Diana is virtually upon us I realise that the shock I experienced then was aggravated by the fact that I had met, on several occasions, the two most famous victims. How often does that happen?

The evolving tracery of forking paths that is our individual life story always throws up surprises, but when I heard the news that Dodi Fayed had also died in the crash it was a sad reminder of our encounters. I had met Diana three times and had once sat beside her at a formal dinner (we talked largely about Jurassic Park, as I recall, a film I hadn't seen). She seemed to me perfectly "nice" - the tired old word is apt. She was pleasant, charming, open. I experienced no "Führerkontakt" frisson: she seemed a tall, slim young woman with a large nose, small mouth and a relaxed manner who was diligently, and without obvious strain, making small talk with a stranger.

My Dodi acquaintance was altogether different. In the early 1990s the director Bruce Beresford and I were trying to set up a film based on my novel A Good Man in Africa. One day in Los Angeles we went to a meeting with Dodi Fayed at his house. Dodi had had some success as a producer with a film called F/X a few years previously. Bruce and I turned up at his front door and were admitted by a butler. It was a large house in a large garden and we could see a pool, a tennis court, shaved lawns and various outbuildings. We were served tea and then Dodi entered. He was tall, broad-shouldered and spoke incredibly softly. He couldn't have been more diffident and agreeable. Every tricky question we put to him he answered with impeccable assurance. We would need to do recces in Zimbabwe and South Africa - no problem. We wanted to cast Sean Connery - excellent idea. The budget was on the steepish side - I have all the money, Dodi assured us, no need for partners. Bruce, who had been wooed by every producer in Hollywood since his film Driving Miss Daisy had won a cluster of Oscars, was highly sceptical. Nothing is that easy, he said to me later, nothing. We decided not to go with Dodi and duly, politely, let him know.

But Dodi didn't give up. He phoned regularly: he assured us he had the cash to make this film, he loved the project, he loved Bruce, he wanted to meet again. I went back to London and Bruce stayed in LA. Dodi called: he was in London, could we meet? So he came to my house and we spoke for an hour or so about the film and the effortless ease with which it could be accomplished - just say the word and it will happen, was the subtext of everything he said. I liked him - he was a likeable man: there was nothing spoilt, brash or pushy about him - but somehow I wasn't convinced. Paradoxically, Dodi's huge quiet confidence did not reassure: it seemed like chronic wishful thinking and made us uneasy. The movie business doesn't operate like that. Bruce and I talked: let's move on, Bruce said, reluctantly. We did, and the film was eventually made. I never saw Dodi Fayed again.

· Another regular autumnal rite of passage that occurs here is when I go into the small room off the attic of our house that serves as my study and look at the 20 or so cardboard boxes stacked at one end and determine to do something about them. This is my stuff, the spoor of my life as a writer - my archive. All this accumulated paper goes back a long way, to my late teens. Unpublished early novels, manuscripts in longhand, carrier bags stuffed with correspondence, notebooks, drafts of my unfinished PhD thesis. What to do with it?

From time to time universities write and offer to take it off my hands and it's very tempting. But the temptation is to do with housekeeping rather than posterity. Things will be neater with all this gone, catalogued and stored somewhere else; there will be more space. Perhaps this is a feeling that afflicts all writers at a certain stage of their writing lives. My first novel was published 26 years ago, my 10th is under way - am I firmly in the mid-phase of my career or is it the beginning of the end? But there seems to me something faintly morbid about getting rid of all this evidence of the years of toil, like picking out a plot in a graveyard. Maybe it's an end-of-summer impulse, this urge to tidy and sort and stow, but I feel somehow it's more healthy to resist it. I close the door and walk away. The boxes can stay there - I'll deal with them next year.

· This week William watched The Shield: "Violent, shocking, exhilaratingly politically incorrect, fantastic characterisation." He also watched the Thin Man films: "Pure escapist delight. Powell and Loy the perfectly matched couple. Great dry banter." He read Marcel Proust by Jean-Yves Tadié. "Tadié knows everything about Proust. The details, the insights, are fascinating."

· William Boyd's latest novel, Restless, is published by Bloomsbury.

· Marcel Berlins is away.