Two and a half cheers for St Valentine

I'm ambivalent about Valentine's Day, never sure if it's a wonderful opportunity to celebrate romantic love or a celebration to be shunned, on the grounds that it's just another opportunity for card companies to rip us off. But yesterday's Valentine's Day was a bit different. I'm married to a journalist who's good at thinking up innovative and usually hilarious ways to send me a Valentine message. This year he acknowledged my probably unhealthy obsession to gather six Louis Ghost chairs for our dining-room and made a donation to the chair fund. (So far, I have two, and if anyone out there is about to throw four in a skip, please contact immediately.) Anyway by 6pm we had a bottle of champagne on ice and were planning a quiet dinner 'a deux' when the phone rang - dear friends who live up the road from us in Lectoure were giving a Valentine's dinner party and two of their four guests had cancelled. Could we step into the breach? Now Lucy is quite possibly the best cook in at least the Northern Hemisphere and their company is always delightful, so we left the champagne on ice and accepted. And what an evening it turned out to be. Everything, from the canapes, through the five courses that followed, was pink and heart-shaped, and before I hear you go 'yuk' it was all absolutely delicious. The table was scattered with pink rose petals. Even the candles were heart-shaped. Elaborate, time consuming and demanding to prepare - I'd have died in the attempt. But Lucy was exercising a gift, and she used it to communicate love.



Out of the blue

Yesterday morning, unaware of the lovely surprise in store in the evening, I'd been reading the New Testament Gospel of Matthew, chapter 28, and thinking about all the ways that chapter demonstrates God manifesting himself in the lives of the earliest disciples. Verse 9 says, 'Suddenly Jesus met them'. Out of the blue, without warning, God sends us a message of love. Perhaps in a thought, something we see or notice, through a book or a film, the word of a friend or even a stranger, in a last minute invitation to a very special dinner - suddenly Jesus meets us.

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts about Valentines Day. And I'd love to know if God sent you a valentine!

Jackie x