Trivia is poison for the soul. It wears you down, grates on your nerves, drives you to distraction. Mental breakdowns and stress-related illness are often due to pressures of the most meaningless kind.

As for romance, few antidotes are as effective as the trials and tribulations of normal, everyday family life. Before you know it, endless concerns of little or no significance take up your entire field of vision.

It takes something extraordinary, perhaps a brush with tragedy, to make you realize what you stand to lose.

When a friend of ours died unexpectedly, leaving behind a wife and a young child, I wrote the following lines to my husband:

My love, when you die ?

if you die before me ?

I shall grieve.

Not for your passing;

I know better than that.

What can’t be altered

must be borne

and gracefully accepted.

But I shall grieve ?

oh how I shall grieve

for each moment of our life together

that we had and did not treasure:

precious gifts left unopened,

blossoms trampled underfoot.

Celebrations

lost forever.

Sacrificed.

Waylaid.

Oh my love, how I shall mourn them.

Many years ago in London, I was visited by a girl-friend in a highly emotional state. I was used to seeing her troubled, plagued by doomed or thwarted expectations, often lonely and depressed.

It transpired that she’d been to a seance. A male voice had sought her out, telling her, tenderly, how much he loved her, how he wished to see her happy, and how he was always watching over her.

“It was my father,” she whispered tearfully. “The father I never knew. He was killed in the war, when I was a baby.”

I reacted with a certain scepticism: “Do you really believe there’s such a thing as spirits ”

“Who knows ” she smiled, unperturbed. “The thing is, it made me realise that he would have felt just like that. And, although he’s gone, I still have his love. It is contained within me. I just wasn’t aware of it before.”

The woman I knew had been transformed. She stood before me radiant, secure in the knowledge that she was lovable and loved. Looking at her, I could tell that the person she had suddenly become had a rosy future ahead of her.

That moment was a turning-point for me, too. For, just like her, I had a father who died when I was a baby.

My son used to have a black-and-white pet rabbit who amazed us all. He was fully house-trained, answered to his name; he played with dinky toys and went cycling in a basket on the handle-bars.

He liked watching the early evening news, sitting on the sofa with the rest of us, occasionally operating the remote control with his hind paw, or sipping tea from my mug when I wasn’t looking.

The rabbit was so much part of our life, we couldn’t imagine it without him scuttling around the house.

After two years he was struck down with “flu”. The nasty kind that few rabbits survive. I rang the vet, who promised to come: a sixty mile round-trip for our precious pet.

While waiting, I took the rabbit on my lap to try and syringe some water into him. Weak, but peaceful, he lay on his side in what seemed an unnatural position. He placed his head comfortably on my arm and gave me a curious glance: not like a rabbit at all.

Later I realized it was an acknowledgement: of my presence, my care, and my love for him. For at that moment I had a rare sensation of love in its purest, most unadulterated form: love stripped of all self-interest, existing only as a mystic force.

I felt it reaching out from me, enveloping the tiny body on my lap like a protective mantle, holding him as gently as my arms, while he breathed his last.

I shall never forget the rabbit or the feeling he, like any living thing, was able to inspire.