The day after the day after St Valentine’s Day… hang on a minute.

Let’s recap: thanks to my amazing financial flair, on the day before the day after the day after St V’s D, instead of red roses the day before the day before the day after-after, I received chrysanthemums.

Which should, of course, properly be chysanthemer (plural). As you’d know if you’d read an early chapter in the book I haven’t got very far with writing yet. Working title, Never Too Late. Sequel to An Elegant Solution.

Or, indeed, if you’d ever been taught by my father while he was still alive. It would be quite scary to be taught by him afterwards.

Anyway, as I say, the next day after… one of those days.

There I was, coming down for breakfast all innocent-like, and the doorbell rang. Answered by our German Artist-in-Residence.

You know how it is.

When the doorbell rings these days, it’s never a friend popping in unannounced for a casual cup of coffee. (Or selling crack cocaine, now only marginally more illegal.)

It’s always Amazon.

Largely because we’re all so bored we can’t do anything else.

On this occasion, it was (or should that be were? Obviously not, but I was so bored I thought I might as well ask you something idiotic) two large cardboard boxes.

Proper boxes, you know. Real, unexpected parcels.

With the word, Flowers, written all over them. Freddie’s Flowers. (Words, I mean.)

Oh here we go, I said, with mock fed-up-ness. Is this what it’s going to be like from now on, I said. Secretly thinking it was rather fun. Certainly was when I was that age.

This is what it is to have a Sweet-Seventeen-Year-Old in the house.

Truckloads of Valentines all day long.

(Of which she’d already had a trickle.)

Never-ending hopefuls beating a path to the door.

(Of which she hadn’t had any. Or, as far as we’ve noticed, crack cocaine dealers.)

Secretly hoping to myself, all the while, that some distant fan had read my blog and decided I myself needed flowers.

Not that I’m hinting or anything.

There must be a card, Shaun said, pretending to look for one.

Doesn’t seem to be, I said. What did the delivery man say, I asked.

Didn’t think to ask him, said G-AiR.

Typical.

Odd, Shaun said.

No card, he said.

I’m sure I ordered a card, he said.

I should explain, if I didn’t already, that these were proper, old-fashioned, decent parcels.

Brown paper.

Organic string.

All the right trimmings.

And there were even instructions on how to arrange the flowers, and everything.

The vase was free, he confessed. Real, big, proper glass vase. The flowers will come every week, he said.

And the fourth week is free.

Though I’m not sure we can afford to keep the order going, he said.

But I couldn’t resist, he said.

(And then spoilt it all by saying, I read about Freddie and he sounded such a great guy.)

On the day my mother died – not that we knew it was going to be the day she died: my father and I thought it was going to be just another Friday; certainly hoped it was – two things there were, spoken, I will never forget.

I got my mother a mug of tea and she and my father held it to her lips, gently, easily, and she drank.

“Thank you,” she said, as she finished. The last words she ever spoke. Indicative of her whole life and wonderful attitude towards it and why she was always so gloriously, fabulously happy. Even when life was rough with her, she was. Always grateful and always happy and always brim-full of love.

My father sat on their bed and said, “What beautiful hands.” And held them.

Friends, these hands were over ninety years old. They were… hands. She wasn’t a pianist or ballerina or anything. Just a brilliant and wonderfully kind mathematician. How beautiful can her hands have been, honestly?

And my father had been married to those hands for nearly seven decades. And I’d never heard him say that before.

But that’s love, isn’t it? On that morning, her hands were beautiful. Her dying hands.

To him, anyway.

There is one thing better than a lover who can afford to buy you flowers every week.

And that is a lover who can’t afford to buy you flowers every week.

But does so anyway.

Nothing else in life can really matter after that, can it?

Well?

Can it?

(PS One of the many fun things about Freddie and his Flowers – along with his personal explanations; his foxy fiery colour choice for this week; the real string and brown paper – perhaps the most unusual, was that the tulips came with their own bulbs. Presumably so that I can keep them forever in the garden afterwards. To remind me of our Ruby wedding, as my parents had a red robin bush.

Why, said the seventeen-year-old, with all the romance that being seventeen imparts which is presumably why they get so many more Valentines than the rest of us, which in any other circs might seem a tad unfair, are there onions in your flowers?)