Mark Reason

Sports columnist

Why ask a snarky sports journalist to write about love? He probably thinks it’s a score in tennis or the name of an American golfer. You want a poet for a job like this. Brian Turner would have a few words to say. Oh well, you will have to make do with my love.

Love is standing on Petone strand wearing big smiles and flamboyant hats from Hills that the two of you have just bought in a silly moment. Love is sitting in a cinema and loving La La

Land together while others walk out. Love is lying in a hammock on an island outside Stockholm and swinging in the breeze.

Love is running through a Wiltshire field being chased by ‘‘she’’, outraged at the uttered thought about her singing voice, violently waving the umbrella you gave her. Love is sitting quietly together reading books as the sun goes down on a golden-blue Fijian evening. Love is entwined on the roof of a church tower or lying on your backs on a festival field looking at the stars as the music shakes the air.

And love is your children catching crabs off a Norfolk pier on a day when they will be forever young. Love is singing ‘‘buzz, buzz, buzz goes the bumblebee, buzz , buzz, buzz goes the cow’’ and their shouts of indignant, gleeful ‘‘no’’. Love is your son saying ‘‘chimbley’’ and your daughter’s helpless tickle-laughter.

Love is your father sitting in a chair on a winter’s day, a look of peace in his eyes, saying goodbye on the last afternoon you will ever see him alive. Love is your mother’s face full of joy as you come out of the doors of airport arrivals. Love is an x on an email from your big brother

Love is James and Jumbo and my little brother and the cascade of pain that came when they died. Love is the moments of joy that stick your memories of them in your mind as they try to fade away over the years.

Love is laughter and friends and pink wine and sunshine and bouillabaisse on a summer’s day. Love is a billion songs full of hope, joy, sorrow, pain and anger. It’s rhyming a symphony from Strauss with Mickey Mouse, it’s visions of your chestnut mare making me see stars, it’s blood on the saddle.

Love is an almost perfect iambic pentameter written in five minutes in a London back room by a Kiwi pop band – ‘‘I don’t know why does love do this to me.’’

I really don’t know, but of the trillions of things on God’s Earth, the greatest of them all is love.