FEBRUARY BURNING
One Saturday in February we drove
from Rome’s Leonardo Da Vinci airport
north up the valley of the Tiber
to Umbertide in Umbria,
a town bridging the river’s upper reaches,
and that had guarded the northern Marches
during the bloody and iconoclastic
turbulence of the Renaissance.
We passed Orvieto and Perugia.
The sun shone unseasonably unfettered,
emollient as a British day in late June.
Folk were sunbathing on the grassy banks
of the motorway service stations.
When we reached our hotel on the town’s outskirts
the air was soft as on a summer’s evening.
Next day, St Valentine’s, the cathedral’s bell
ringing for mattutino, the flat fields
of vines, where lovers and iconoclasts
might lie – between the curving river
and the long road south – were drowned in mists.
This month, that here always used to be bleak
and wet, has become a changeling. Years
after Umbertide, on another
Valentine’s, we sat on a council bench
beside the corniche in the lee of the Orme,
sunning ourselves like superannuated
terrapins. The uninhibited sun
burned through a haze of blushing coral
above Penmaenmawr over the bay.
Februarius from februum,
‘purification’ – perhaps like the heat
and the calm of love’s absolution.
Rosanna McGlone
March 6, 2026I love the ‘superrannuated terrapins’ and the ‘haze of blushing coral’ and this, David. It’s really evocative:
‘…St Valentine’s, the cathedral’s bell
ringing for mattutino, the flat fields
of vines, where lovers and iconoclasts
might lie – between the curving river
and the long road south …’
Jeff Teasdale
March 10, 2026Lovely, David… Lorna keeps a scribbled diary, and we look back on some similarly identifiable days (like Valentine’s, or wedding anniversaries, or birthdays) to see what different things had happened on them, year by year, as though they were random ‘events’ but held together by a drawing pin on our notice board.
Which reminded me of once reading about people – artists, poets and writers, I think – who take a map of where they live, and place it over another same-scale map of another random place and, selecting places of significance-to-them on the top map, push pins through to the second map, and then go and visit exactly those second pin-pricked places, either to photograph them, write about them, or draw them. A new use for my redundant A-Z map-books, stacked in multi-layers, with places connected by a common worm/pin hole?
Is it random, or is it not? I need another 60 years to pursue this!
And another has just come back to me… for couples who know each other very well… or think they do. Arrange to start separate journeys at two ends of a strange town or city and, knowing what the other’s interests are, try to find each other during a day. Apparently it happens that they meet surprisingly quickly. Although you might miss the most important-(or-to-be)-person-in-your-life by five seconds and you sail past each other, just by looking the wrong way, at the wrong time…. Yuri Zhivago and Lara for example (or teenage me, and Julie Christie, for another!) for those of a certain age and romantic (teenage) disposition!
Many thanks again, David. You transported us to both Italy and Wales in those few, perfectly chosen, words and images.