Valentine, O Valentine

Made more spiced peaches with delicate and fragrant  white peaches that arrived in a crate from my neighbour. I will give her some of the peaches when they are ready. I simmer them with just a little star anise and a little sugar and water. They are so sweet they need almost nothing.

Valentine’s Day supper preparations underway. Took out and trimmed the duck breasts, picked my Asian herbs, bought  Seville oranges at the market. I will use a deep red table cloth, just for the drama of it, and use blue Bristol glass goblets, small silver candle holders. My friend with lupus gave me some potted flowering anthuriums and I will put them down the centre of the table. More drama. The dog will be put out to  play in the garden so we can all eat in peace.

William Trevor writing on the ‘exquisite difficulty’ of the short story and the short story writer VS Pritchett, for those who love short stories:

“A child of our time,” Elizabeth Bowen called the modern story, irrespective of its source, and she was right. At the very heart of modernity, it belonged to a briskly different age and almost perfectly reflected it. Its matter-of-fact brevity did, its sense of urgency, its glimpsing manner, its stab of truth. Troubled Ireland took to it; Italy, too; in England it didn’t much appeal. Overshadowed by the riches and delights of the Victorian novel, it was regarded by literary England as little more than a poor relation living on the crumbs scattered by the popular success of fiction that flourished as fiction never had before. But these humbly gathered crumbs were more wholesome than they might have been. They nourished a modest art, and in modesty the English short story eventually found itself. It discovered the value of a quiet voice and acquired, in time, a quality it since has made its own: distinctive, spare, unfussy.

I like that mention of modesty and also the ‘distinctive, spare, unfussy’. Which is in part why I so dislike the sentimental hype around  Valentine’s Day, even though I like the snap of a little drama and believe love should be celebrated more often, any kind of  tender and compassionate feeling, any enduring  agape.