February is not one of my favourite months. Yet frequently, as last weekend, there comes a mild moment when you can be fooled that spring is here. I remember such a week in February 1945 after a hard white winter in Belgium and Holland when this happened and we walked out without greatcoats. For some odd reason I still remember how at the time my memory flipped to spring the previous year, to a hot silent spring day in the empty square at Stow-on-the-Wold where I had been left to guard a khaki truck while my superiors went off for a lunchtime drink. Very hot, very empty, quite silent – a silence such as one scarcely hears nowadays except perhaps in quieter reaches of provincial France. The only other vehicle parked in the square was a one-time London inter-station bus, single decker at the front, two-decker at the rear, camouflage painted and used by the American forces equivalent of ENSA. Gently from within it there trickled, out into the midday heat a few tentative languid notes from a guitar, after a few bars these were then gently elaborated by the most marvellous swinging jazz clarinet: two sounds playing to each other decorating the emptiness then working themselves into a frenzied midday joy with me the only audience. I often wondered who was playing… I was too entranced to go and find out. The music faded. The dream stopped. My superiors came boorishly out of the pub feeling superior and we drove away. I had a small snubby ink sketch of S. Edmunds, a lovely old house now a shop, on the margin of my “Picture Post” and a vignette of sound in my head that I shall never forget. What strange incidents make up those parts of life that are so memorable, never the important world-shattering events, momentous issues – only the gentle tinkling, lovely things – or is that just me being stupidly romantic again? Is that what is meant by seeing things through rose-tinted spectacles because if it is then I willingly accept the charge.