Dear Mother,

I realise I have been writing to you a lot about love recently, and lovers, and the types and temperament of love, and it's various cuts and carats, so I suppose you may have guessed that it has been on my mind a lot. I do hope I have not bored you to tears with my churlish observations - a serious risk, I admit - and yet I feel forced to continue. Your long-suffering patience has thus far proved indefinite; I trust you will forgive this also.

Love: sublime, yes, but alas it doesn't always work out. Imagine everything that was once so good, so sweet, so incredibly incredibly right and perfectly destined in the course of things is now just a lump of red hot coal burning a bottomless hole in the pit of your stomach. Caught up and helpless, tumbling and tumbling in the whirl of an irresistible force - the hand of God HIMSELF has picked you up and brought you into heaven! then slammed down viciously against the ground. Even the Fates themselves are shackled to Fortuna's wheel Mother, as I'm sure you are aware. To us small mortals it seems nearly impossibly that a fire so strong, so shining, could splutter out and rasp to embers, but it happens, and regularly. What's even worse is that the fire never entirely goes out. You know I wish to hell there was a simple switch that could shut off heartache with the flick of a finger. But there ain't. There isn't.

Old war wounds do tend to flare up on frosty mornings.

Hippocrates considered the matter medically, and once diagnosed a case of love sickness in the young prince of Antioch, who had unfortunately fallen in love with the king of Antioch's wife, his stepmother. The “cure” in this case was for the king to divorce his wife so his son could marry her — though how exactly this helps the likes of us I'm not sure. Some psychologists, agreeing with Hippocrates diagnosis, think love to be similar in structure to a mild case of obsessive compulsive disorder, or even a mania, a kind of mental illness that can take grip and shake the brain until it sloshes in it's globe.

I think of love as a piece of shrapnel, and some days are worse than others.