When I see blonde young women around 23 my feelings have nothing to do with lust (a word seldom used now). They are feelings of having seen my Rosemary for the first time that December 15th in Mexico City.

When I see teenage girls I think of my own daughters and Hilary’s (my youngest daughter) two daughters, my granddaughters.

I have been giving this some thought of late. I have been toying with the idea of cycles and or stages. I now feel that cycles repeat ,but not in my life, so I am simply reminiscing on my own stages.

The happy side is that everything in my life was a happy one and everything worked out well with few, if any, tragedies. The death of my parents was inevitability.

But, not so, the death of my Rosemary on 9 December 2020. Death was the final stage in her life, and it was and is a sad stage for me.

On the Shakespearean theatrical stage, my life in my memory, is of me on theatre floor staring at myself  at the stage of my life. I know how it will end and there will not be any curtain calls.

All the above went through my mind when I saw today English Rose, Rosa ‘Gabriel Oak’. It shows two stages. One is the beginning of the unopened bud and the other of a lovely rose past its moment of absolute beauty.

I can remember my Rosemary as that bud on 15 December 1967 and then that tragic (but still lovely face to me) in the days before she looked at me and asked, “Am I dying?” She died 6 minutes later without my answer.