You’re not cross with me?

I say my teenagers because I include myself in the tribe, even if I haven’t given myself a letter.

M, N, A, C, H. Maria-Chjara and Nicolas, Aurélia, the cyclops, Cervone, and all the others. The great business of love stories. I assure you, you haven’t missed a thing, nothing new has happened, only timid attempts to approach one another. I’ll keep you posted if anything happens.

But perhaps you don’t think my bouquet of flirtations is very serious? Small fantasies that even those concerned will have forgotten as soon as they become adults.

So I’ve been thinking about you, and I’m going to tell you a complicated, unhappy, twisted love story, the kind you like.

A story about adults.

A man and a woman.

My father and my mother.

In fact, they’d been getting on quite well since the start of the holidays, which isn’t to say that things are usually bad between them, but they aren’t all that good either. Let’s just say they’re a bit nothing. Papa comes home late, Maman waits for him, they talk about the things that need to be done in the house, the next day’s shopping, or the fact that the bins need to be put out; sometimes they go out together, and they probably make love when that happens. But since the beginning of the holidays things have been going better, as far as I can tell: a little kiss on the neck, a little ‘You’re looking lovely, darling’, a little bit of harmless laughter. If I had to choose, I would say that Papa’s the one who’s making the most effort to recharge the batteries of their libido. And then BAM!

Crash bang wallop. Disaster.

Let me explain. Papa and Maman met in Corsica a lifetime ago. Maman was travelling around the island on a motorbike with her friends. Papa lived there with his parents at Arcanu Farm, overlooking the peninsula. I don’t know any of the details of their romance, I just know that they met here, on the Revellata, on 23 August 1968, Saint Rose’s day.

So every 23 August is the anniversary of the day they first met. That day Papa dutifully goes off and buys a bouquet of flowers – depending on the year, red roses that symbolise passionate love, white roses symbolising pure love, orange roses symbolising desire. But none of them, according to family legend, is as lovely as the bunch he collected for Maman that first summer, a bouquet of eglantine, the free, wild rose that Maman loves so much. Rosa canina.