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