A Valentine’s story
It was 1997. I was living in Paris, and I was (not very happily) single.
One day in February I was coming home with a small shopping bag. The homeless man sitting outside my building, who I was friendly with, noticed it as we chatted and asked if it was a Valentine’s Day present.
As I said that it was just a CD I’d bought for myself I realised that it was in fact Valentine’s Day, and that the title of the CD was… ‘a short album about love’ (by The Divine Comedy).
It did make me laugh, if a little bitterly…
Six months later I met my husband. We never celebrated Valentine’s Day, because I refused to have anything to do with it.
I bumped into the homeless man some time later. He was with a group of rough sleepers in a metro station. But he was only visiting. He’d found a job, and a place to live.
