Today my best female friend is 65. At least she'd be, if she were not dead on the 12th of October 2013.

She didn't leave in an unexpected way. Unfortunately both of us knew her time was limited, but this awareness didn't make her departure less painful for me. We are made of rational and emotional sides and what our rational side accepts as a matter of fact we cannot change, still remains an unfair bad trick of fate for our emotiveness, which is unable to resign.

I have never been able to get on very well with other women, so my friendship with her was even more precious for this peculiarity.

If we had to speak of my relationship with her in few words I'd say we were sincere and we felt free to be ourselves with each other. We created a privileged way of communicating based on mutual trust, mutual tolerance and a lot of humour and self-irony.

Immediately after her death many people thought to make a tribute to her posting on the web various pictures and messages, even though the majority of them knew very little of her as a person.

I didn't do anything publicly.

I knew she would not have liked that at all. We had spoken about that. We spoke of all, simply, without restraint. But I know also that she would have appreciated people's intentions even though she would have preferred it might be shown in a different way. She has always been more generous and tolerant than me about others and we have so often joked about our features on this point. I played the contrarian, the iconoclast, while in reality she was the strong rebel, who could dominate her temper for others' sake.

I miss her in a way words cannot express. I miss her more than I expected to miss her.

I have never thought it's right to idealise people only because they are dead. I think that death doesn't make anyone either better or worse than they were in life.

My friend spoke too much and I teased her terribly for that, then we both laughed together. We never laughed at each other, we laughed together about ourselves.

She was maybe a little too optimistic about life in general, but this feature was perfect to temper my excessive scepticism.

We liked repeating that we were perfectly complementary and joked by saying that if we had merged in only one person the result would have been remarkable. Then I added "Well, but what could happen if this person would take only our flaws instead of qualities?" and she laughed with her shining eyes and said "Then we'd become only one woman, short, catholic, sardonic, grumpy, asocial and definitely too talkative!".

I cherish all the memories I have of her and they are so many that make me feel rich. We have created things together, made projects, shared worries.

Even though we lived in two different countries we communicated every day, even several times a day and we were closer than if we had lived next door.

The last time I saw her in person was on the 14th May 2013, on my doorstep, while she was leaving after a stay at our home. My husband was driving her to the railways station. She had told me, since we never stood on ceremonies that it was not necessary I went there too. While she was getting into the lift she turned her head toward me and waved, smiling.

Five months after that day she died.

Obviously I have already experienced several dear ones' and good acquaintances' death, but her death has struck me in a very particular way. It has made me think over about the frailty and the meaning of our ephemeral life so much and every time I have gotten deeply involved in these speculations I have felt the sudden need to share my thoughts with her, because we liked so much mixing up our reasoning and to find a thread which might lead us somewhere. At that point, as when one wakes up from a dream, I realize once again that she's not there anymore and I won't have any further chance to speak to her.

She loved her children, her husband, her cultural roots, books, photography, white wine, gastronomy, cinema and she loved also me. I feel grateful to destiny for the chance I had to meet her.

Every year on her birthday I invented little funny procedures to offer her the small presents I had chosen for her and her kind husband was my accomplice in this affectionate game, preventing her from barely touching the parcel I had sent before the fatidic date and presenting her the small gifts in the right order. Then she immediately took photos of each of them and sent them to me. It was a personal and deeply rewarding ritual.

This year is different. She's not there anymore.

But I keep her alive in my mind, day after day and on her birthday I can only feel grateful because she was born.

Lá breithe sona, mo chara álainn!

I have the habit to ask myself many questions, but I can rarely find satisfying answers by myself.  I presume I'm not intelligent enough to fully grasp what is a bit too different from my frame of mind.

Just to mention an example, I can't understand why so many people take photos of famous paintings when they visit a museum and why they mostly do it with their mobile phone or small basic cameras.

I can understand, obviously, why so many people feel deeply emotions seeing in reality a masterpiece which they had seen many times before in books of art or in documentary films.

But it's beyond my imagination what pushes them to take bad pictures of it, while it's full of perfect photographic reproductions.

I suppose that all the people who have visited the Louvre Museum in Paris have felt a pang of discomfort finding themselves in front of "Monna Lisa" by Leonardo (which by the way is a painting of reduced dimension, over protected by a thick glass, already a little disappointing for this reason at a first impact), half hidden by a forest of arms holding mobile phones in a frantic ecstasy of clicks.

What for? I'm unable to understand.

Another question will follow this one immediately. Why a few paintings have become so famous and have been transformed in Pop icons, while others, equally marvellous or even more, don't receive the same passionate attention?

In reality " Monna Lisa" was not so terribly famous once. It became more "interesting" for a large audience after its vicissitudes, as the fact that in 1911 it was stolen by an Italian whitewasher, who had kept it hidden under his bed for two years.

Another masterpiece of painting has started "menacing" Monna Lisa's pre-eminence as the most famous picture of the world. It's the one called " Het Meisje met de Parel" ( The Girl with a Pearl Earring) by Johan Vermeer. The picture is splendid and Vermeer was an extraordinary artist, but, let me say, only 20 years ago this painting didn't enjoy the enormous popularity it has nowadays.

The origin of its popular success can be found maybe in a book with the same title, written by  Tracy Chevalier, who mixed up real elements of Vermeer's biography with fiction and imagined who the mysterious model of the picture could be. The novel is enjoyable and I wonder why the following novels by the same author have never reached the same level of quality, but this is another story, of course.

 As it often happens, after the success of the book, someone decided to make a film based on the story. I didn't like the film at all, so I won't spend any further single word on it. But the fame of the picture was even more amplified and I'm afraid that several –a little superficial–people are really persuaded that the fictional character imagine by Chevalier was really the girl of the painting.

So also the unknown Dutch girl has become another Pop icon.

Masterpieces of painting sometimes become celebrities exactly like movie stars, rock singers or sportsmen.

Many people who go to see them in an art museum don't look at them as they are, but as if they were the main characters of a famous soap opera, sitting at a café table. If they could, they would ask for an autograph, or else they just bombard them with clicks taking snap-shots.

Exactly like when there is it doesn't matter what celebrity walking in the street and fans take totally useless shots with the omnipresent mobile phones.

Maybe finally I have found a  partial answer.

Rituals are common in every society. So it means they are a spontaneous answer to humankind's needs and surely play an important role in social texture, it doesn't matter of what cultural background.

  A ritual is any practice or pattern of behaviour regularly performed in a set manner.  Anniversaries, New Year, ceremonies, weddings, holidays. The list is long and we all know that there are codified habits related with each of them.

I suppose it depends on the fact that human beings are sociable animals, so they need to identify themselves with their group, even though they might be conditioned by hierarchic positions. The common ritual celebrations mark their belonging to the group as well.

Nearly all animals have the instinct to live in a group, or in a pack, if you prefer. The ones who prefer loneliness or just a couple life are a minority.
I can think only of the majority of felines, which are solitary, and some kinds of birds.
Practising the rituals of one's own social group is a sort of language, it's somehow reassuring.

Fashion might be considered like a group ritual too, to identify oneself with the member of one's kind. People choose to wear in a similar way to affirm their belonging to a specific group.
The alternative is a kind of nearly unnatural isolation, which can be painful when it's not voluntary, but has its positive sides when it's a consequence of a free choice.

Today it was sunny and bright where I live, quite calm. Unfortunately not too winter-like.

It was a common day, exactly like yesterday.

We went out early this morning and we saw an ermine running along the road in a field. It was so evidently visible, all white in its winter fur against the field, incongruously covered with still green grass. Its fur, made to camouflage it in winter, was totally inadequate for the lack of snow.

Just another common day, exactly like yesterday.