The same as a deck of playing cards, a box of eggs, or a Syrian hamster. And no I’m not looking up the weight of a Syrian hamster’s heart. This isn’t Pets Wins Prizes.

Someone dear to me has had their heart broken and so I’ve been reflecting on such matters: as metaphor, as signifier, as emoji, and as the most crucial and intricate of instruments in our bodily make-up. For what is the heart if not your internal rhythm section? It’s Moon and Entwhistle, it’s Reni and Mani, it’s Sly and Robbie, keeping time, dictating the beat, providing the very pulse of your existence.

There may be 50 ways to leave your lover, as Paul Simon would have it, or 51 if you count Daniel Day-Lewis supposedly ending his relationship with Isabella Rossellini by fax. I’m all for recycling and previously used this line in my first piece of published journalism in the List magazine some 30 years ago, a live review of The Bathers. Now there was a band who understood heartbreak and how to soundtrack the end of an affair. Dry your eyes, mate.

The thing is that life can’t be all hearts and flowers, and those millions of cardiovascular emojis sent across the ether each day don’t necessarily convey romantic sentiment. I was on a train from Perth back to Auld Reekie the other day, pondering what romance means while trying to banish thoughts of strangling the guy across the aisle who was taking several relentlessly sociopathic minutes to crush a drinks can.

I didn’t actually time it but this torture seemed to last all the way from the Forth Rail Bridge to Jenner’s Depository. It put me in mind of American Psycho more than American Graffiti; the latter a film suffused with romance, from the neon glamour of a Saturday night in small town USA to the use of Del Shannon’s Runaway in the soundtrack and the legendary DJ Wolfman Jack’s midnight radio incantations.

But why not widen the parameters of romance and what gladdens the heart? I propose that in Room 102, the one right opposite Winston Smith’s rat trap, we ask Paul Merton to include: the sight of Jenner’s Depository (a building which whispers almost home); anything by Stevie Smith (poetry, prose, drawings); the Persian cat asleep on a red velvet cushion in a New Town basement seen out of the corner of your eye; the yellowing photograph of a grandfather in his naval uniform circa 1941; the small Japanese toy figure your partner slips into your jacket pocket the morning of a big job interview; and the smell of Boots hair gel which you used many years ago when, oh I don’t know, entertaining thoughts that you were James Dean, or Truman Capote, or Tony Leung Chiu-wai playing the male lead in the beyond cool framing of 1960s Hong Kong (but actually filmed in Bangkok) from In The Mood For Love.

So much for the universal then. I have a question for Marie Antoinette. If you can have your cake (a French Fancy?) and eat it – perhaps Mr Kipling’s least favourite idiom – while being told to eat your heart out, does it follow that you can also have your heart and eat it? And is the organ in question a lonely hunter or a caged muscle? Answers on a bloodied postcard please. And you wonder what that old woman always sat in the Place de la Concorde was knitting. Most likely not a bobble hat.

But we’re talking heart and not head here. A family member had a heart op many years ago and was in and out of hospital within hours, glugging a pint of Guinness with my brother in a Glasgow pub before the day was out. My own heart has known maladies, more in the emotional sense, while trapesing the corridors of the Edinburgh Royal in the mid-noughties at visiting time for the Neo-Natal Unit, with two of our kids being early arrivals to this party we call life. For one of them that wasn’t enough but it was his liver rather than his heart that secured a further fortnight, this time in the old Sick Kids.

I took to sending emails updating friends on his weight (compared with a bag of sugar, not a Syrian hamster), his colour (so many shades of yellow), and quoting Willie Nelson lyrics (Funny How Time Slips Away). Country musicians sure do know a lot about heartbreak. But this is one romantic story with a happy ending in that said former half bag of sugar has just borrowed the car to take his mates to play golf. And he loves Johnny Cash.

Regrettably though, I have no cards or egg box to hand, and a French aristocrat may have lost her head in the telling, but at least no Syrian hamsters were harmed.

Not even by the Persian cat asleep on a red velvet cushion.

Rodger Evans