Drop the Dead Memories.

I’m doing it again – reading old correspondence from a time more lived and gasping at the relative richness of it all. The folders in my Hotmail account go back sixteen years, and so there’s no shortage of material. Today I came to some stuff I wrote to the woman I styled The Once and Future Queen (the Arthurian connection was apposite.) She was the most certain and significant of them all.

I want to tell you all about gulls and gannets and the greatness of ocean storms, I wrote in one unguarded moment (the rest of the missive having been largely about the seashore, footprints in the sand and suchlike.) Her reply included: Some day I'm going to wake up and finally grasp how unbelievable is this rare thing we share.

So what happened? She woke up one day and didn’t believe the rare thing we shared, and then left me for another life. It didn’t hurt much.

I think we should have a mantra for when things are lost:

‘Shut the lid, lock it, throw away the key.’

Remembering rarely serves any useful purpose.