sense and sensibility

The Hopkins poetry festival is underway in a nearby town.
It has attracted the usual international coterie of students and university professors to our rural abode.
Among the visitors is my old friend the Rose of the Orient.
Today I am walking with her through the Hill Wood in Monasterevin.
Rose is China's leading professor of 19th century English poetry.
She has a stern forbidding intellect.
But the rest of her is very nice indeed.
So nice in fact, that every inebriate in the Republic of Ireland seems to want to latch on.
At academic parties the more decrepit the Paddy Whack professors, the more likely are their hands to go accidentally a roving over the fine topographical contours of the Rose of the Orient.
I have never gone out with a really pretty girl before so I find this behaviour most unedifying.
I am developing a mathematical theory to describe it.
The theory goes: The sexually delusional behviour of the squares on the hypoteneuse is directly proportional to the sum of the opposite angles on my girlfriend's gajungas.
The equation has some flaws but it's basically sound.
So here we are lost in the woods.
No really we are.
I parked the car.
We rambled.
And now we're lost.
She doesn't know it yet and is enjoying the stroll, because I am still insisting I know precisely where we are.
Which is sort of true.
I know we're lost in the woods.
The talk turns to one of those decrepit Irish professors I mentioned earlier.
"Ronnie Fothergill has offered to help me with my thesis on Yeats," the Rose informs me.
I look briefly aghast.
Ronnie Fothergill is professor of English at some odious five hundred year old college in the west country.
The college is nearly as old as he is.
"He's going to help you with your thesis," I murmur bitterly. "Is that what he calls it? No doubt his ulterior motives will soon become apparent to you, poor innocent girl that you are."
"It's not like that," says Rose.
I stand stock still beneath the flowering greenwode tree.
"Helping with the thesis is an Irish ephemism for sex," I proclaim bluntly. "We say it at parties. We say it at dances. We say it in the streets. It has only one possible meaning. And it's got nothing to do with helping with your thesis."
She shakes her intellectual head.
"No," she says, "he's very genuine. What you don't realise James is that he only has a year to live."
"I think you'll find he feels better in the morning," I reply darkly.
"He is a good man," avers the Rose.
This is too much.
"Ronnie Fothergill is a limb of Satan," I cry. "No. He's not a limb. He's not as important as a limb. He's a toe. Ronnie Fothergill is Satan's big toe."
"You really think he's insincere?" wonders Rose.
The leaves are shimmering all around us.
"Oh come on Rose," sez I, "we've all used that line. I won't live another year,but just one night of love with you e're I die..."
We wander off through the woods.
Along the sun dappled walkways of this leaf fringed heaven, I can see no shadow of another parting.