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First love…..

18th March 2007 by Helena 2 Comments  

I am pleased to report that unlike me, Olivia has fallen in love for the first time and he actually likes her too. The object of her affections is Quentin, brother of Maud, Leo’s girlfriend who apparently does love him after all (see Parental Truths Number Two blog).

Leo told me this evening that the reason he knows she loves him is that she came to his house. I didn’t want to disillusion him. I mean she could just have come to watch The Sound of Music, or pick up the Barbie doll she left here last time or even stroke the cat. It’s a bit like the scene in About Last Night when Rob Lowe says to Demi Moore that he noticed her eyeing him up and she says: “There’s a clock above your head.” But good luck to him and better to live with your illusions than not is my view, it’s always worked for me.

I first realised Olivia was in love when she came home and told me there was a “really annoying boy at school” whilst grinning broadly. Then a few days later she told me I would like him because he “looks just like Leo, only bigger.”

I do like Quentin and now that Maud has told Olivia he is in love with her too (but obviously he can’t tell her because he’s “scared” of her) I like him even more. He is a boy with excellent taste in girls, unlike Julien who ignored Bea for more than a year in favour of Noah (I mean please, whoever heard of a girl called Noah?). Anyway, she’s now in love with Dorian, and jolly pleased with himself he is too.

All of them are a bit young to feel the full force of first love but as a taste of what’s to come I leave you with a quote from Turgenev’s short and extremely readable book entitled, guess what? First Love. A bit of a theme over the last few days……

“My blood was in a ferment within me, my heart was full of longing, sweetly and foolishly; I was all expectancy and wonder; I was tremulous and waiting; my fancy fluttered and circled about the same images like martins round a bell-tower at dawn; I dreamed and was sad and sometimes cried. But through the tears and the melancholy, inspired by the music of the verse or the beauty of the evening, there always rose upwards, like the grasses of early spring, shoots of happy feeling, of young and surging life.”

Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2007


Filed Under: Children, Life, blog --> Tagged With: first

2 thoughts on First love.....

  • Beta Mum says:
    24th March 2007 at 9:33 pm

    My daughter – just six – says she has 18, 19 or 20 boyfriends, depending on her mood that day.
    But she still devotes most of her energy to invisible friend number 1, Dick.
    That’s when she’s not shrieking at her brother to “get out of my room” or “give that back” or simply “stop it.”

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    28th March 2010 at 5:23 pm

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Helena Frith Powell was born in Sweden to a Swedish mother and Italian father, but grew up mainly in England. She is the author of eleven books, translated into several languages including Chinese and Russian. She wrote the French Mistress column The Sunday Times about life in France for several years. She is a regular contributor to the Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, The Times, Daily Telegraph, Tatler Magazine and Harper’s Bazaar.

Helena has been the editor of four magazines, including M Magazine, a supplement for the Abu Dhabi-based National Newspaper and FIVE, a high-end fashion glossy, also published in Abu Dhabi. Helena was also editor-in-chief of 360 Life, a quarterly glossy magazine published with the Sports 360 Newspaper in Dubai, part of the Chalhoub Group.

Helena contributes regularly to UK-based newspapers and magazines and holds a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Cambridge. She is working on a thriller set in Sweden as well as a novel about the relationship between Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield called Sense of an Echo.

In 2022 her short story The Japanese Gardener came second in the Fish Publishing Short Story Prize. One of her stories was also shortlisted for the Bridport Short Story Prize. When she’s not writing, she works as a headhunter for the media and entertainment industry for the Sucherman Group. 

Helena, who was educated at Durham University, lives in the Languedoc region of France with her husband Rupert and their three children.

Bibliography

More France Please, we’re British; Gibson Square 2004

Two Lipsticks and a Lover 2005; Gibson Square (hardback)

All You Need to be Impossibly French; (US version of above) Penguin 2006

Two Lipsticks and a Lover; Arrow Books (paperback) 2007

Ciao Bella Gibson Square; (hardback) 2006

Ciao Bella Gibson Square; (paperback) 2007

So Chic! (French version of Two Lipsticks) Leduc Editions 2008 (also translated into Chinese, Russian and Thai)

More, More France; Gibson Square 2009

To Hell in High Heels; Arrow Books 2009 (also translated into Polish)

The Viva Mayr Diet; Harper Collins 2009

Love in a Warm Climate; Gibson Square 2011

The Ex-Factor; Gibson Square 2013

Smart Women Don’t Get Wrinkles; Gibson Square 2016

The Arnolfini Marriage; Amazon Kindle December 2016

Smart Women Don’t Get Wrinkles (paperback); Gibson Square spring 2018

The Longest Night; Gibson Square spring 2019

 

 

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