On Twilight and the Girl With Flaxen Hair.

I would say that tonight’s and last night’s twilights were warmer, quieter, and therefore generally balmier, than any we had during the three main months of summer. And there was a hot orange sunset sitting low in the western sky, while the rest of the firmament was unclouded and coloured various shades of wholesome azure.

I looked up at the windows of my west-facing front bedroom where one of the casements was standing open, and it occurred to me that if I were a competent pianist, and if I had a piano resident in the front bedroom, I could sit and play Debussy’s La Fille aux Cheveux de Lin to drift serenely across the landscape.

And, of course, there would at that moment be a lovely young woman with straw blonde hair strolling slowly up the lane which lies beyond my garden. She would stop and watch me with rapt attention, her lips raised in a peaceful and lovely smile. And when the piece was finished she would say ‘thank you for playing my tune’, before continuing her stroll beyond my sight and out of my life. I would never see her again, and would always wonder whether she had been real or only a figment of my imagination. And I would be left to question, as I so often have, what is real and what is not.