Dear Readers,

Taking time off from our busy Tokyo tour to acknowledge the amatory significance of St Valentine’s Day, Helmut and I celebrate as usual, from our most favourite romantic location: propped up at the bar of a local pub. This hallowed spot is where we first met, dear readers, and so it goes without saying, that a pub cocktail will always have a special place in our hearts, and, as Helmut loves to joke, in other vital organs, too! Yes, it’s true that Helmut’s bladder fails to make a splash in the Tokyo bar’s heated toilets, but never mind, as it keeps the cheery janitor employed!

Helmut Fails To Make a Splash

Hubby Helmut and I have an exceptional love story. After all, how many couples can exactly recall the pub in which they first met? We cannot recall either, but according to the charge sheet, it was the Queen’s Head, Croydon. What a romantic setting, dear readers, and I sigh even now, to think of that magnificent sapphire Helmut presented me with, on our second date!

Yes, that bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin was my first of many, and in our twenty romantic years together, Helmut estimates that, as drunken sots, or ‘double shots’ as he playfully likes to call us, we have polished off more than ten thousand bottles, thereby proving the wisdom of the old adage: The Family in a Daze Together, Stays Together!

Happy Valentine’s Day!

A little poem to help you through the day…

Worst Side Story

Star-cross’d lovers

When first they met….

The tale, ‘Romeo and Juliet”

contains Love, Death, Betrayal…the lot…

(without which, of course,

there’d be no plot!!)

Alas our Juliet and Romeo

They loved too much – and had to go!

Had they survived, would married life

have brought our pair… .delight. ……or strife?

“Oh Romeo… Drudge!, Wherefore art thou??”

 ”I’m here, you rancorous, Capulet cow!”

“What light through yonder window breaks?”

“Revealing wrinkles, teeth – all fakes!”

“You shallow toad!!. I am your spouse!!”

“A plague I set upon your house.” 

“You heartless Cur, you….. you… Montague!!!

“I kissed a lot of frogs for you!”   

With that, she kicks him where it hurts

And rips up all his silken shirts

And Romeo of course hits back

And tells her that her ‘bum looks fat’

And thus the pair cause quite a din

until old Nursie hurries in

She comes with poison and with knives and forces them.….

to take their lives!!!

And so here ends our troubled tale

With love grown rancid, bitter, stale

The moral of the story’s this:

To live in deep romantic bliss

and win the title ‘Love’s Young Dream’

Don’t live past Shakespeare’s final scene!!

Helga Hewston