Nearly two months ago I left hospital after five weeks from which many thought I wouldn’t! My thanks to the Kings College neurological consultants , nurses and those who get you going again. If there was a Valentine hug- it would go from me to you.

Since then a combination of things has overwhelmed me and I find myself needing to have help doing the simple things we all do. I will need scopes to check I haven’t got something that could do me in and I got a call explaining what would happen.

To be honest, I was not so much frightened of the procedure but of the timing. Please not next week with us working to change things in pensions and me needing to be at hand so that this happened!

Yesterday a woman from University College Hospital phoned to say that I could have work done on my bottom half over the weekend of 22nd. I had asked if I could be seen over the weekend never hoping that I could.

I gave the lady I was speaking to a day-early hug.  I phoned Dr Tommy at the Neumann GP practice, I dropped a line to Sophie from Kings who looks after me in spirit and I gave my partner/wife a huge actual hug for being there every day I was in hospital and since.

And this morning is Valentine’s morning and yes my body isn’t feeling great and I know it will have to go through some bad before it goes through some good, but I am ready for that.

And I want to thank Jenny Smith , who is my Superintendent Minister at the Wesleyan Chapel and I hope she gives some and gets some comfort from Sarah Smart with whom she shares some sadness but with him she can get strength!

Valentine’s Day is a great day. It was historically the day of the Parlement of Foules , Chaucer wrote a poem about it (in original here) and Wilhelm de Hamilton painted this moment of imagery!

Beneath me as I type runs the Thames past Eton and Windsor. ducks, geese and seagulls are waiting to be fed and like the ducks above, they are numerous and noisy.

We have food for them and when I finish this valentine message to you I will go feed them.

I heard the owls last night who Hamilton paints sitting above all – as wisdom should.

I see but cannot hear the swan who floats on the river close by, as Hamilton paints his swan.

I read Chaucer’s 700 line poem when at college and loved it then.  Here is the plot

The poem begins with the narrator reading Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis in the hope of learning some “certeyn thing”.

When he falls asleep, Scipio Africanus the Elder appears and guides him up through the celestial spheres to a gate promising both a “welle of grace” and a stream that “ledeth to the sorweful were / Ther as a fissh in prison is al drye” (reminiscent of the famous grimly inscribed gates in Dante’s Inferno).

After some deliberation at the gate, the narrator enters and passes through Venus’s dark temple with its friezes of doomed lovers and out into the bright sunlight.

Here Nature is convening a parliament at which the birds will all choose their mates. The three tercel (male) eagles make their case for the hand of a formel (female) eagle until the birds of the lower estates begin to protest and launch into a comic parliamentary debate, which Nature herself finally ends.

None of the tercels wins the formel, for at her request Nature allows her to put off her decision for another year (indeed, female birds of prey often become sexually mature at one year of age, males only at two years).

Nature, as the ruling figure, in allowing the formel the right to choose not to choose, is acknowledging the importance of free will, which is ultimately the foundation of a key theme in the poem, that of common profit.

Nature allows the other birds, however, to pair off. The dream ends with a song welcoming the new spring. The dreamer awakes, still unsatisfied, and returns to his books, hoping still to learn the thing for which he seeks.

Lesson to me then, don’t spend your days and nights reading books, get out and live life! I will today with my wife/partner and I hope today you are with and find your formel!

Do not let the rigours of life dispirit you. I would have cause to be afraid were it not for my friends, the NHS and what Methodism brings me.

And let’s hope that the shift of my operation to the weekend will mean that we get important work done next week!