Love and inanimate objects

This morning we awoke to the picture postcard perfection of snow dusting the top of the hedge, banked cheekily into the corners of the window sills, blanketing the lawn like a lacy tablecloth, giving the car an identity crisis.

Snow has a very funny effect. Just looking at it makes your face break into a grin and a childish relish grow in your heart. Last night as I watched big, fat flakes driving in horizontal flurries, I was jiggling with glee. I was worse than the children.

Part of the charm of snow, is looking at it from the warmth and cosiness of your own home - and hence my admission of undying love. Is it right to love an inanimate object? I cannot help but flush with joy at the sight of it, sitting there, quietly and with unassuming manner going about its work, pumping out heat - there you go, the object of my affection - our new heat pump. I love you Mr Fujitsu.

Last winter I attended to the writing business huddled next to the oil column heater, wrapped in at least 3 layers of Merino, another of polar fleece, a knee rug, ugg boots stretched around two pair of Merino socks, trying to write with fingerless gloves (in sexy turquoise blue, thanks Mum) while still shivering. This year...I love my heat pump.

Of course, love is a fickle thing. Give me a few months and I'll be treating it with ignore and it will be feeling taken for granted. Then come summer and it will be feeling redundant, and unneeded.

Last year's object d'amour was my laser printer - I swore life could never be the same now I had my laser printer - I was blinded by love.

The year before that it was the cast-off ibook from Hubby. He got the new computer, I got the cast-off, but still it was love, even if it felt a bit like picking up a new pet from the SPCA. Don't get me wrong, I'm still deeply admiring if my ibook, she has given birth to one novel, and helped in the gestation of another. She still looks stylish, in a mature, tired kind of a way. I've almost worn the darling out, and she is what I sit at now, expanding my world from the four walls of suburbia into the World Wide Web. She has stood by me through so much and I know I shouldn't let my eyes stray further afield, but I fantasise about widgets and new operating systems. I long for more USB ports and a sexy, slim model with a bigger screen. I feel a pang of furtive guilt as I flick through the latest eye candy in the Magnum Mac catalogue - out of sight, of course, and whisper and point out the features of my latest crush to friends, hoping desperately it wont get back to Mme Mac. The lengths we will go to to hide our infidelity.

But I fear it cannot last. She is, with increasing frequency freezing me out. I have to work hard to press her buttons and get her to restart, hoping, praying my hard work is not erased from her memory, lost forever. She has taken and refuses to return one of my CDs. I may be harbouring thoughts of infidelity, but she is proving unreliable.

Some time soon, somethings going to give.