Voulez vous coucher avec moi, ce soir?
Valentines Day. God, the very words call to mind visions of gooey-eyed teenagers with boxes of cheap processed chocolate and little bits of recycled 'off-red' card (rather like this week's paper...) with something about the colour of roses on them. Bah humbug, I say. As far as I am concerned, Valentine's Day is a bizarre ritual gone wrong.
One assumes that it started off in an "anyone can say they love them to anyone else and, whatever happens, you must be nice to the person saying it and, at least for a day everyone sort of finds out how other people will feel and plenty of people will go 'Me too! Yay!'" Everyone watching will go "awww, how chweet". Although this seems to have descended more into an "I got more Valentines than you and I got some cheap flowers and we're going out tonight and who care's that last week I said the guy was fat and ugly with an IQ numerically comparable to my waist size - at least I have someone on Valentine's Day to have dinner with" scenario.
Ah yes, dinner. You know that lovely little romantic restaurant just down the road? Well be advised - you will have to book several months in advance: the number of covers will have been doubled by tired and over-run waiters who will take every opportunity to point out that it is Valentine's Day after all, and they can't be held accountable for the bad service. The fact is that an intimate dinner has turned into a dinner with you surrounded by six other tables - all whispering, trying not to start a fire with the romantic candles and the revealing "If-I-don't-get-a-shag-I-will-kill-you" dresses. Not to mention the set menu which you'll inevitably have to play through the nose for.
As you might notice, I'm not the romantic type - or, rather, I'm not the commercially romantic type. Whisk people off to unplanned weekends in Paris/Brighton/your room (depending on budget), bring them flowers that you yourself picked, make them dinner, by all means. Whatever it takes to avoid the saccharine display of weird one-upmanship that the day turns into.
And another thing - the point of the day is completely lost on me if you already have a partner. It just turns into one of those "I can be a complete arse all year round, but it's all OK coz once a year I get you a box of Milk Tray" (cf. Mothers' Day and, even more so, Fathers' Day). And, while we are on the subject, no lady that I know (and certainly no lady worth her salt) "loves Milk Tray". They actually love chocolates with a detectable cocoa content that were not lovingly pressed into weird shaped moulds by machines, but rather hand-made with the utmost care.
The display of gratitude that ensues after you've given her a box from your newsagents is: a) due to her being thankful for the fact that you haven't completely forgotten about her existence as you had seemed to; and b) nothing compared to what it would be like if you gave her some real chocolate. I've never given ladies Milk Tray or decent chocolate (or not in that way) so wouldn't have any idea, but am reliably assured this is true by a few friends in the know...
Last year, I spent two hours on the 15th of February listening to a friend complain about how she wishes she had never gone to that restaurant with her boyfriend, as he kept staring at this "little bitch" two tables away and the whole experience reminded her too much of how it "used to be" when the relationship was fresh and how she wishes that he/she/the little bitch were dead and how "it all sucks - badly". I didn't mind at the time, since it got me out of cleaning up the spilt Haagen Dazs, but I can kind of see her point.
As far as I'm concerned, the whole day is obsolete. Far fewer nerves would be wasted on worrying about it all if people just asked someone out - or asked them for a shag, which is what it so often means (or is that just me?) Why not do this rather than building up all of their hormonally-driven highly improbable hopes and dreams into one rainy day? "Love sought is good, but giv'n unsought is better" after all. But then it's probably too late for that by the time you read this. Ah well. There's always next year...
14th Feb 2002