Claws For The Weekend: Romantics Semantics

A Valentine’s Day conversation. It all started with a FB status update:

Just treated Jen to a free coffee in McDonald’s with my stickers. Happy Valentine’s Day people.

Someone commented that she was a spoilt woman.

It could be an all dayer:

I was referred to as the last of the big spenders.

Do you know those thick, juicy Big Mac burgers? Well I might give Jen the gherkin off mine.

Two comments came in about romance not being dead.

How can romance be dead when you can get two hash browns for a quid?

Someone helpfully suggested that we could have whipped up to Iceland (the store, not the country) and got a bag of hash browns for a quid.

I can’t let her cook on today of all days. But thanks for the tip, though. Next year she can do a tray’s worth on the 13th.

And finally a guy I know commented that he’d booked a table for eight and hoped his partner Marge liked snooker!

Don’t believe a word of it, though, we’re all romantics at heart.

Have a good weekend everyone, see you on the flip side.

Hope we’re not all single.

Death Do Us Part: A Letter From The Trenches

I read this moving letter, with a moving conclusion, on a FB post for Valentine’s Day. It is taken from the Imperial War Museum.

A letter from the trenches. 1917

Private Albert Ford wrote to his wife, Edith, on a scrap piece of paper before going ‘over the top’.

“My darling if this should ever reach you it will be a sure sign that I am gone under and what will become of you and the chicks I do not know but there is one above that will see to you and not let you starve,” he wrote.

“You have been the best of wives and I loved you deeply, how much you will never know.

“Dear heart, do think sometimes of me in the future when your grief has worn a bit, and the older children, I know won’t forget me, and speak sometimes of me to the younger ones…

“Dearest, if the chance should come your way for you are young and good looking and should a good man give you an offer it would please me to think you would take it, not to grieve too much for me…

“I should not have left you thus bringing suffering and poverty on a loving wife and children for which in time I hope you will forgive me.

“So dear heart I will bid you all farewell hoping to meet you in the time to come if there is a hereafter. Know that my last thoughts were of you in the dugout or on the fire step my thoughts went out to you, the only one I ever loved, the one that made a man of me.”

Albert was killed in action on 26 October 1917. His last letter was treasured by Edith until her death. She never remarried and as she lay dying in February 1956 she said she could see Albert in the corner of her bedroom.