A Few Of My Favourite Things

Everyone ought to have a favourite book. There should be a book on your shelf, mantelpiece or floor (or indeed wherever else you might keep your books) that is a particularly battered paperback. The edges are scuffed from where it has bounced around in a bag, there might be the accidental tea-stain decorating the corner of a page, and there might even be multiple copies from when you couldn’t resist a snazzy new cover design. A favourite book is both well-thumbed and well-loved.

I have found that my favourite book has loved me nearly as well as I have loved it. It has nursed me through colds, heartache and pre-exam jitters. I have read Romancing Mr Bridgeton more times than can possibly be necessary and even now I can remember the first time that I found it on a library shelf. It is a story full of wit, hope and happy endings. I do not expect that this book would be everyone's cup of tea, and nor should it be. As I said everyone ought to have a favourite book of their own. But still I cannot quite resist the opportunity to share a little...

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On the sixth of April, in the year 1812 – precisely two days before her sixteenth birthday – Penelope Featherington fell in love.

It was, in a word, thrilling. The world shook. Her heart leaped. The moment was breathtaking. And, she was able to tell herself with some satisfaction, the man in question – one Colin Bridgeton – felt precisely the same way.

Oh, not the love part. He certainly didn’t fall in love with her in 1812 (and not in 1813, 1814, 1815, or – oh blast, not in all the years 1816-1822, either, and certainly not in 1823 when he was out of the country the whole time, anyway). But his earth shook, his heart leaped, and Penelope knew without a shadow of a doubt that his breath was taken away as well. For a good ten seconds.

Falling off a horse tended to do that to a man.

It occurred to her that it would have been nice if she could have said that she’d fallen in love with him as he kissed her hand before a dance, his green eyes twinkling devilishly while his fingers held hers just a little more tightly than was proper. Or maybe it could have happened as he rode boldly across a windswept moor, the (aforementioned) wind no deterrent as he (or rather, his horse) galloped ever closer, his (Colin’s, not the horse’s) only intention to reach her side.

But no, she had to go and fall in love with Colin Bridgeton when he fell off a horse and landed on his bottom in a mud puddle. It was highly irregular, and highly unromantic, but there was a certain poetic justice in that, since nothing was ever going to come of it.

Why waste romance on a love that would never be returned? Better to save the windswept-moor introductions for people who might actually have a future together.

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