Valentines Day
I shall be spending Valentines day in a less than ideal way. My cunning plan to stage a modern rendition of Much Ado About Nothing with Kate Winslet cast as Beatrice and myself as Benedick on Valentines Night 2006, in my apartment in Toronto seems to have gone awry. Love is such a fickle mistress.

During a Roxy Music tour in 1977 Bryan Ferry called girlfriend Jerry Hall at the Camelturd Ritz in Morocco to ask how she was. What she didn't know was that Bryan was reading about the affair she had just commenced with Mick Jagger when she popped backstage after a Stones concert. What Mick didn't realise was that she really wanted to be with me. If only the ice cream wafer she had posted me anonymously with her Peckham phone number on it had not crumbled in the envelope, if only I had reached puberty by then, it could all have been so different.

The philosophers, poets and playwrights have had much to say about love...

Calvin: What's it like to fall in love?
Hobbes: Well... say the object of your affection walks by...
Calvin: Yeah?
Hobbes: First, your heart falls into your stomach and splashes your innards. All the moisture makes you sweat profusely. This condensation shorts the circuits to your brain and you get all woozy. When your brain burns out altogether, your mouth disengages and you babble like a cretin until she leaves.
Calvin: THAT'S LOVE?!?
Hobbes: Medically speaking.
Calvin: Heck, that happened to me once, but I figured it was cooties!!

or as Elizabeth Barret Browning said.....

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.

I love thee to the level of everyday's

Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.

I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;

I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.

I love thee with a passion put to use

In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

With my lost saints, I love thee with the breath,

Smiles, tears, of all my life! and, if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after death.