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Life’s been a little tousled of late, like a ball of string that’s been stuffed in a draw, until when you pick it out to use it you realise it needs a lot of unpicking!

So deep thoughts are at a premium, but I did have one thought perhaps worth sharing.

It’s a commonly conceived belief that love and friendship are all based on the affairs of the heart, they are in essence emotionally driven. But I want to challenge that, by suggesting that love is a decision too!

When we choose to like someone, it’s mainly a head decision. We literally ‘decide’, based on some sketchy positive information about that person that we are going to like them, or less positively, dislike them! In fact you may be reading this now and thinking ‘hmm, I like what this guy has to say. So until dissuaded otherwise, I’m going to like him’. Or… you may be thinking ‘what a load of rubbish. This guy must be a complete twonk”. If it’s the latter I won’t expect positive feedback, a ‘follow’ or perhaps even a Christmas card!

My point is that when we meet someone new we can either give them the benefit of the doubt and choose to like them while we make up our minds about them, or we can go into the situation pre-decided to dislike them until they prove us otherwise. The first option leads to making a lot more friends!

So for that matter what is love, if not initially a firm ‘like’ that gets reinforced to a full body agreement that ‘like’ should be upgraded to ‘love’! After that it takes an awful lot of decisions to keep loving even through the tough patches.

With that in mind, my wonderful wife has allowed me to share the finished picture that I recently gave her of herself. I say ‘allowed’ because it is a little personal and sharing it globally took some thinking about, but we hoped it might be encouraging to someone.

Anyway here it is. The final blurry snapshots of my latest piece, finished.. more or less. After these shots are some shots too of a new piece I started today.

The following shots are of my current project. It looks a little like what my son described as “the sort of blurry flower picture that old ladies paint” at the moment, but it’s only the undercoat and some splashes of paint. It should toughen up after another day’s work… I hope.

In honour of Bill Shakespeare

SONNET 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

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