Enjoying time embracing shadows on drops of love

Margaret and I spent some hours yesterday walking in a most contemplative manner on the drops of water left in the air after Bessy has jumped into the water. It's a pleasant pastime and brings many rewards for the active mind. Bessy, incidentally, spent the whole day attempting not to produce a splash when she dived in so as to deprive us - in the most loving way - of this experience. She failed not least because a Basset Hound joined in and failed to realise quite why Bessy was so preoccupied with shaping herself like a sewing needle.

Felix, I discovered this morning, had spent the weekend examining the footsteps of a society ill-at-ease with itself during the autumn of 1354. The footsteps, he tells me, were interspersed with incisions typical of a common practice at that time of cutting one's shadow in order to release one's desire for central heating. This, it seems, was to deny an unhealthy preoccupation with the future. I asked Felix if the footsteps revealed a healthiness in their appreciation of the present. Felix looked at me for some time before saying that the footsteps were in the past as soon as they were made and, thus, could reveal nothing about their - or our - present health or otherwise. Bessy and I looked at each other rather blankly.

George used to wrap surf boards in electric cable and sell them to newly-weds as a means of establishing marital harmony through pseudo-electromagnetism. It would appear that the device, when spun continuously by the happy couple, produced so much attraction between them that they were locked forever in an embrace around the board. I suggested that just because people were embracing each other didn't mean they wanted to. George wagged a finger at me and told me that cynicism was at the heart of all relational dissolution. I gulped guiltily and made my way to the surgery.

Cookie was distracted this morning with an unpleasant memory of a conversation she'd had with an upturned lover wearing decorative bobbles whilst painting clouds with his toes. That left me to attend to Mr Cherook who was in for root canal treatment. Mr Cherook is attempting to metamorphose into a cast-iron lamp post bearing no shadow on passers-by. I asked if such a light was needed to prevent an unhealthy preoccupation with the future that would lead to all people dis-embracing catastrophically. Cookie at that instant left the lover and said that there was no way of knowing what would make people let their trousers down in the dark. Mr Cherook looked completely confused. I struggled to follow too.

Be that as it may, I wondered if the future would mean anything if I was a drop of coloured water embracing my lover and gazing on our shadow below. I suppose it would depend on whether there were dogs having fun. Or anybody else for that matter.