On a cold and sunny winter morning I step into the blueness of a beautiful Sunday. The boys are practicing their music…trumpets, drums and cymbals…music like young, breaking voices.
8.00 am: My footsteps don’t echo anymore as they did when I was walking along the empty halls of the old stone building. Not a soul in sight. It’s blue today…bluer that any winter morning I’ve seen. And cold too. I hug my black woolen overcoat closer, the hood bunching at my neck. How blue, how bright and how deserted.
8.15 am: I love this lane…wide and strewn with leaves and clean, even pavements on either side. Just an occasional car whizzing past…probably a happy little family on their way to Sunday morning church.
8.20 am: I love to crunch dried leaves on the pavement…it’s more fun doing it alone.
8.25: Still very cold. Made a little better by strong cappuccino and chewy warm brownies under a brilliant orange umbrella facing a lawn. The colours are still amazing…bright blue, sparkly white, fiery orange, chocolate brown.
8.30: My hands have warmed the leather cover of the book I’m carrying. “Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow” (Jerome K Jerome). Ah! Sitting alone in a coffee shop, bundled up in warm clothes with only a coffee and a brownie for company!
9.30: Wake up from reverie. The sun is on my face and the white pages are screaming into my eyes.
10.00: Walk into a large magazine shop. Space, lights, endless lines of glazy, colourful magazines and two of my favourite cats. I’ve never seen bigger, friendlier cats in my life. The black one’s called Funtee (and I’m glad I don’t know the white one’s name)
Some steaming boiled corn, a long walk and an unexpected meeting with an old friend later…I look back at a passage I read in my leather-bound book:

We take all things in a minor key as we grow older. There are few majestic passages in the later acts of life's opera. Ambition takes a less ambitious aim. Honor becomes more reasonable and conveniently adapts itself to circumstances. And love--love dies. "Irreverence for the dreams of youth" soon creeps like a killing frost upon our hearts. The tender shoots and the expanding flowers are nipped and withered, and of a vine that yearned to stretch its tendrils round the world there is left but a sapless stump.

To life and love. And to whatever if left of each.
Happy Valentine’s Day.