Lovebirds

I WAS reading a collection of entertaining stories by the Swedish playwright and novelist, August Strindberg (1849–1912), who alludes to one of nature’s more tragic and suppressed love affairs:

“The love between doves has been praised by the poets, and they certainly mate for life, but (a dreadful ‘but’ for the poets), if one partner is wounded, damaged or defective, love takes flight, and the other seeks a new mate. This is indeed very unpoetic, and therefore no poet has dared tell us the truth about the celebrated love of doves, for fear of angering the ladies.”

Given the strange article that appeared in yesterday’s Guardian, involving a worrying trend among men who take their wives hiking and then abandon them in the unforgiving wilderness, I am certain a lost wayfarer’s subsequent demise at the hands of either hypothermia, a bottomless crevasse or a hungry yeti will prove equally ‘unpoetic’ in the eyes of the average bard.

At least the fact that doves ordinarily symbolise ‘peace’ is correct in the sense that two chattering squabblers divided by misadventure equals one who has procured a lifetime of silence. Unromantic, perhaps, but a simple exercise in the mathematics of marital misplacement.