Iknow Valentine's Day was last week, but surely you will indulge my speaking on this subject, which, after all, is really always in season.

With Your Permission Constance Scrafield- Danby I have had reason to talk to many friends in the last couple of weeks to whom I have not spoken for some years. People get busy; they get out of touch; they become distracted by new friends; we cannot have time to stay closely in touch with everyone that we know and love. There are only 24 hours in any day.

It does not matter at all to the basic fact that a true friendship can never be dulled by time or distance, which puts both time and distance in their places. We are very preoccupied by time, by how scant it is and how quickly it flies by. Yet, to speak to or see an old friend after any length of time, be it weeks or years, does not change, by an iota, the warmth and the familiarity. We pick up where we left off as though we stopped in mid-sentence all that while ago.

Nor does distance matter. It makes no difference how far away a loved one is. Affection cannot be altered by geography. It waits patiently for a call or a reunion of any kind, holding the warmth safely until that time.

Old friendships are the well-tested and tried jackets of our emotional lives. They are our much valued comfort zones, the glue that holds us together through the trials of our lives. Old friends sometimes surface unexpectedly but just at the right moment, just when they are most needed, out of an instinct born of the friendship itself. Old friendships are the ones that have lasted through the discovery of all our faults.

Please remember that if "love is blind", then it cannot be love for it is only by knowing the worst of a person and loving him or her still, that love is true.

Love transcends time. It stops time in its tracks and makes it irrelevant. The passing of time changes us physically, teaches us lessons, expands us philosophically, but it cannot rearrange us at our base. Love becomes part of us; it is not just a simple emotion, a mere feeling. When we truly love, that affection enters into our personalities and becomes indelible.

Of new friendships, I have something to say. They are the great new adventure: the excitement of learning about new personalities, of anticipating the years of growth to come, dipping into the lights and the darks. Yet, I think a new friend is recognisable almost at once, along with "love at first sight". The kindred spirits call to each other on a level that no science is going to explain.

Equally, science cannot rationalise the chemistry that brings lovers together with a force that can make or break a life.

I am not

I am not a big fan of romantic love, for it is often "blind".

It is too confused with that chemistry, too tyrannical for health, too unpredictable, too easily broken.

People go nuts and make a myriad of mistakes. The unruly passion mars thinking but creates great poetry. Marriages that work are between people who were, or who become, best friends. So, a good marriage is a good friendship.

Then there is respect, which I define as the love of the intellect.

It is usually much harder to earn the respect of a person than his/her love. It is the calm rational assessment of another's whole self, without judgement, but with acknowledgement within one's own self of admiration within one's own standards for that other person. In my opinion, love and respect do not necessarily go hand in hand; certainly, there can be respect without love.

For sure, in the last couple of weeks, I have been reminded that I am loved. I did not doubt my friendships, old or new; I had no intention of testing them, but it has been wonderful for me to feel them all around me.

I was talking to a minister one time about life and love and God, you know the sort of thing one does talk about with, especially, a minister and, in that moment, it came to me that I understand God in a way that might even make sense to those who "don't believe".

If you delve into your own self and find the place where you most deeply and completely love the person or persons you do: your spouse, children, sibling, parent, friend - whoever it is; that place is the bit of you that is God.

On any level, using any semantics you care to, that place of totally unselfish, passionate, indelible love which exists in all of us is where our spiritual life lives, is the place where God exists and is, really, the proof that God does exist.

That is what I think, anyway.