I’ve been thinking about love again today (not that it’s ever far from my mind). Today though, there is a reason for this contemplation.

I had a chance conversation with a casual friend last week. The person concerned was obviously on a mobile phone and by the sounds of it in a busy street. When I asked about their health (as you do) at first I got a strange response. Then the person to whom I was speaking confessed that no, he wasn’t OK actually. He was in pieces because his wife had walked away from their marriage, with a wodge of cash but without a word or seemingly a second glance. There was absolutely no warning. She just disappeared one day with the money.

The person concerned isn’t a really close friend or anything like that, though I like him well enough, in fact I’ve only met him a handful of times. He is, though, what I’d describe as a strong person so I realised how deep his despair must be to tell a virtual stranger such a sad and terrible story. He must have really, urgently needed to talk because he was clearly not in a private place and I am little more than a stranger to him….though I did once send him an email link to my Wendy Henry piece of a couple of years ago, so if he looked through other entries, perhaps he knows me better than I realise.

Anyway, sometimes you just know when you need to send someone a few kind words and some good vibes so I did just that and I then heard back from him today. He was really touched that I’d bothered and was comforted by the fact that I’d expressed things in a way to which he related. I was really pretty pleased to have been a help.

I observed to him that when you lose a loved one in this way, it’s like being bereaved but there is a difference. When you love someone and they are taken from you by an act of fate, there seems little else to do but find a way of accepting it and trying to rebuild a life. When you lose someone you love because they have chosen a life without you, you have the complexity of knowing that the object of your affections is living, breathing and experiencing life but has chosen to do so without you. That’s really tough. I know – it took me twenty years to accept that decision and move on.

Strangely or otherwise it wasn’t my ex-husband who turned me into an ice-queen – it was someone long ago. I was in the land of the living dead already when I decided to get married.

My ‘recovery’ from zombie territory came about through David, who some would say will never be truly mine….but that’s another story. David awoke my senses and brought me to life. He tells the tale (indeed he recounted it on Saturday night at dinner) of how I wasn’t ‘lindarocks’ when we met, I was ‘lindaisalive’ and that told him a great deal about me.

Even more weirdly, I had a brief period of internal anguish when, out of the blue, I was contacted by the person I could never get over the fact that he lived and breathed and loved another and didn’t love me, through pbase a couple of years ago. I had not heard from or of him for twenty-five years. It was the strangest feeling and for a brief moment my life seemed to be whirling out of control.

Then I got a grip. I realised that for the first time in many donkeys’ years, I was happy to be where I was…..which may sound strange given that I almost immediately threw it all up in the air again to move to Cornwall. I don’t actually mean I was happy where I was in Sandhurst, I mean I was happy in my own skin. I was happy to be me and happy to be part of a relationship with David.

I suppose what I’m coming back to is to live each day for the moments it contains – if life has taught me one thing it’s that and I know I’ve said it many times here in this forum. You never know when you won’t have the opportunity to share that moment or simply feel glad to be in someone’s arms again.

I wish happiness soon returns to my friend and I send him good vibes.

This photo I am pleased with - it's not the first time I've done dead and dying flowers, some even of my own making, but it's certainly high on my list for this subject. I was just sitting by the vase all day and watching the petals drop, then I thought 'ah'.....

Last year, lambs....