Romantic Travails

I read Charlotte Grey in 1999 and stored this quote away to give me perspective when fretting over affairs of the heart and to try to make me remember not to bore my friends too much.

'...how absurd and irritating most people found the romantic travails of others. How different her own dilemma was, how much more serious... everyone was convinced that their own plight had a particular poignancy, a special unfairness. She was just like all the other young women; her crisis was as perpetual and comic as theirs.' Sebastian Faulks Charlotte Grey
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Great Uncle Henry

So today we're off to celebrate Great Uncle Henry's 100th birthday. He still lives by himself in the home he and his wife bought over fifty years ago in Bow, East London.

A quotation about how we change through life seems appropriate today.

..."there is no such thing as a coherent human personality. When you are forty you have no cell in your body that you had at eighteen. It was the same, he said, with your character. Memory is the only thing that binds you to earlier selves; for the rest, you become an entirely different being every decade or so, sloughing off the old persona, renewing and moving on. You are not who you were, he told her, nor who you will be." Sebastian Faulks Charlotte Gray

we heart it

Happy Birthday Henry x

Believing

So this time last year I journeyed off by myself to collect my wedding dress. I didn't realise how emotional it would be. Walking out of the shop carrying my dress - I was about to get married. Wow. This was so right. I realised that I'd always hoped to marry but I'm not sure I let myself believe I would. There's a limit to how many times friends can say 'Of course you'll meet someone' and then you don't, and then you do but it doesn't last, and then you don't and then you do - and this time it grows and lasts and you're about to be walking down the aisle to the man you love.

'She had never really believed that it would work out happily; she had hoped, but she had not believed.' Sebastian Faulks Charlotte Gray

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Birdsong

'No child or future generation will ever know what this was like. They will never understand. When it is over we will go quietly among the living and we will not tell them. We will talk and sleep and go about our business like human beings. We will seal what we have seen in the silence of our hearts and no words will reach us.' Sebastian Faulks Birdsong

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It doesn't seem quite right to be celebrating all the great literature about France without mentioning the wars. This passage spoke to me years ago when I read Birdsong. It speaks even more having been to Ypres on a freezing November weekend.

Love, Respect and Fancy

We went to Worthing Pier and played on the 2p slot machines.

Warmth had a turn on the fruit machines I thought of this quote.

'What did we want from a man, what were we looking for? What I wanted was someone I could love, respect and fancy. I thought that was what one should be aiming for,...And when I started with men it always seemed as difficult as getting three strawberries in a row on a fruit machine.' Julian Barnes Talking it Over

It couldn't have happened a day before it did.

Writing yesterday about being the perfect age and sometimes wishing that I'd met Warmth sooner made me reflect back on this quotation.

'You are the other half of my soul. I can't bear that I wasted all those years before I met you.'
'I wasn't ready for you. It couldn't have happened a day before it did. My life was leading to that point.'
Sebastian Faulks On Green Dolphin Street

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