Love Was In The Air...

...H and I have been bonded long enough not to overboard on the "Get your coat, you've pulled" angle of love. We take the years together - not for granted, but as a sign that it works, that it was meant to be and that E herself [dau.] is affirmation of it all.

Nonetheless, we do our duty with cheerful heart in commemoration of St. Valentinus [perm one of three martyrs]. Cards of a playful kind are exchanged, chocolates are purchased for pleasure - though rarely hideously over-priced flowers. (Nick the News was prepared to offer a dozen roses for several dozen of Her Majesty's best pounds. I had to reply that as I didn't have a dozen women on whom to lavish such treasures I would pass the offer.)

Yesterday was no exception. Though both equally stirred but not shaken by Colonel X's extraordinary assault on our domestic castle (of which lots more to come I am certain), we had determined to spend the evening in simple domestic harmony, accompanied by a soppy film and a decent wine.

That was, though, to reckon without E. E being a mid-teen there are certain things one has had to learn to expect and others that come as a complete surprise. The surprise element was a totally genuine unconcern about whether or not she would be receiving her very own first Valentine's card from a boy who is somewhere between friend and beau.

It being half-term there was no question of a personal exchange, and as they haven't yet bothered to swop full postal addresses nothing could be expected to land on the morning mat. That time will no doubt arrive in due course and one hopes it will all work out as it should.

One's own experience of the thing is somewhat limited (not at all cool as a thing in itself and therefore to be avoided was the general sense when I was a single pre-Rector). The one occasion one can recall on which a genuine "I'm sending this anonymously because I really, really hope you feel as I do, but I'm not sure" card was sent, it was indeed reciprocated - which sounds on the face of it excellent. (There were, however, certain complications too private to mention, though not so imponderable as not to be undone - albeit temporarily - by mutual desire.)

That the result was a week away in a foreign country with a certain personage is a idyll never to be lost, though it also cannot be forgotten that tears on either side were later shed. As the film says "We'll always have Paris" and there are few of us who can quote that great line from 'Casablanca' and actually mean it as the literal truth. (Or as that great crooner Leonard Cohen once memorably sang: "I loved you in the morning, our kisses deep and warm - your hair upon the pillow like a sleepy golden storm...")

Anyways, casting nostalgic remembrance aside as one must - the matter of E and the non-Valentine having been successfully negotiated, the little treasure blithely announced that she would awfully like to go to a local show-jumping competition that evening as one of her friends was competing on a new horse, and would we mind awfully not spending the evening in domestic harmony but instead run her out and back to the event?

And what do doting lovers do? Well naturally, accede to the request, abandon the champagne and chocs and toss a coin for who has the chore of going with her. H is left with travel jankers and I'm left with a night on the Internet playing poker. That E's friend came fourth in her class and I came third in my tournament is not quite consolation enough.

Romance is not dead as such - it is merely left pining in a horsebox near you.