Arts

The right time of year

THE INCHWORM TALE

IN the 1952 film ‘Hans Christian Andersen’, Danny Kaye sang the Frank Loesser song, ‘Inchworm’.

After a debate over whether imagination or book learning was most important, he watches a caterpillar ‘measuring’ the diameter of a marigold in its repeated, regular movements while the children are learning their times tables in a repeated, regular chant.

Andersen tells the inchworm that its arithmetical skills will take it far, but suggests stopping awhile to notice the radiance and beauty of the flower.

Both options are good, with neither excluding the other.

If you would sow marigold seeds, this is the right time of year. If you would like to learn a new skill to help you get ahead, or work on increasing your imagination and appreciation, it is also the right time of year for that!

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Arts, France, History, Literature

The ‘billet-doux’ should return!

SHORT-SWEET LETTERS

Have you heard of a billet-doux?

During the Thirty Years’ War, when French soldiers might have slept in a different town each night, they took their chance, whenever they could, to write home.

The letters from their latest “billet” would hopefully be “sweet”. And so the term “billet-doux” was derived.

The practice carried on into peacetime, with many a young lover receiving regular letters, generally of no consequence other than the assurance of undying love.

Of course, the subject doesn’t necessarily have to be love. It might be gratitude, appreciation or wonder!

In an age when people often claim they don’t have time to write letters, might we encourage the return of the short, sweet note – the billet-doux?

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Arts, Literature

A Prophetic Ray?

THE BEST REASSURANCE

LORD BYRON’S The Bride Of Abydos is a tale of frustrated love set in Turkey. There are a few lines we might take to heart even if we don’t live in a Turkish palace.

Deciding that their love will be for ever unrequited and the world will be a darker place because of that, the young man urges his beloved to rise above the sadness and be a blessing to the world:

“Be thou the rainbow to the storms of life

The evening beam that smiles the clouds away

And tints tomorrow with prophetic ray.”

We might be a rainbow or even a smiling beam, but a “prophetic ray” for tomorrow? Sometimes the best reassurance we can give is the “prophecy” that there will be another day tomorrow.

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