The eagle-eyed amongst you will have been pecking around for fresh carrion amid these pages. Alas, the catalogue of dismaying news since, well, since the beginning of the year has had an eponymously dismal impact on notions of expression which is one useful definition of Art.

The artistic world has lost a cataclysmic number of its titans in but a few weeks. As sense can’t be made of this felling [or p’raps it could but not by me] it might be a compassionate response to reflect on how those we’ve lost live in our hearts?

The resuscitating nature of love pertains to those in our immediate ken, people known personally to us whose idiosyncrasies drive us nuts or poultice indulgence: it is they who help us discover new chambers and hidden dimensions of our hearts.

How often have you been to funerals or memorials and listened to eulogies all about the speaker rather than the deceased? What we lose when someone loses their life tends to take precedence over their heretofore eternal absence. But what if focus were placed not on loss but what was gained as a result of them being in our lives? Surely, then, the shift in emphasis would help heal the ache which starts in the heart and goes deep into bones and sinews which hold us together?

The death and taxes thing would be softened would it not, were it to read instead ‘love, death and taxes’? Come to think on it, would every single aspect of life not be enhanced were love to inform, shape and direct it?