Be my Valentine

It’s getting to that time of year when a pinky-red cloud casts a shadow over our lives, calling into question the solitary bliss in which we spend our days and shooting a pang of loneliness into our warm and open hearts. Valentine’s tends to be a bad time of year for everyone. For those of you that have ‘someone’, it throws anxiety and fear into your stomachs when the realisation kicks in that the present you just shelled out November and December’s salary on is not going to ‘cover it’ for February too and a new inventive, insightful, thoughtful and probably expensive gift is going to be required if you’re to remain out of the dog house. Valentine’s is even more worrying when you have been specifically instructed by the love of your life ‘not’ to buy something, since Valentine’s Day is a ‘commercial invention designed to engage our consumerist society and forcing them to spend untold amounts of cash (which would be much better used by the starving children) on clichéd and insincere declarations of love and affection’. I have a couple of friends who spout this sort of Namby-Pamby bullcrap around this time every year, only to be bitter and disappointed when their instructions are followed to the letter and a donation is made in their name to the local hamster-welfare charity.

It goes without saying that Valentine’s is pretty rubbish for those of us ‘without other half’. My problems start as early as Christmas, when I have to start figuring out who to send cards to. Besides the short novel that gets written and sent annually to the love of my life, I have to whittle a potential 20 recipients down to a reasonable 3-ish, before choosing the tone, style and content of my cards. As a child and young teenager, I was a veritable Valentine’s card making factory. I would spend March through to December having jumble sales, running fun-runs and being sponsored for my silence in aid of the fight against deforestation and global warming. I would then spend January and February undoing all of my hard work when ‘Operation L.O.V.E’ came into effect. Reams of pink, red and white paper, gallons of PVA glue and vats of glitter would be carefully crafted into love-hearts and painstakingly folded into flowers and stars. A few minutes would then be spent composing the appropriate poem to accompany my homemade efforts. Usually something along the lines of ‘Roses are red, violets are blue, my name is Emilie Lemons and will you be my boyfriend and love me for ever and ever?’, before they were carefully sealed with a lipstick kiss and distributed in a timely fashion (often via our school Valentine’s post box). Then the waiting would ensue.

And still the waiting ensues. I did go through a period of receiving a red-rose every year from one of the boys in my form who sat behind me in registration (you know who you are…). Which was lovely, but did not always make up for the fact that he spent the rest of the year taunting me for my flat-chested-ness and trying to throw bits of screwed up paper through my hooped earrings… He also used to send one to the girl who sat a couple of seats away from me. Who didn’t have a flat chest.

One year, when I was ‘teaching’ 7 year olds in South Africa, I made all of the children in my class make Valentine’s cards in their art lesson and then went to great pains to describe that they could send them to anyone they liked, someone ‘really special’, who made them ‘really happy’, like ‘their best friend, or their Mum or their favourite teacher’. I then feigned horror and surprise when 16 cards arrived in my pigeon-hole by lunchtime addressed to ‘teecha Emeley’.

I have also (occasionally) had a boyfriend on the dreaded day and they have responded in various ways to my neediness. My first boyfriend would shower me with rings and jelly tots and all the good stuff. Pretty much everyone who followed failed to meet my requirements or ran into disaster. There was the year when my uni boyfriend paid my housemate £2 to make us baked potatoes with baked beans (since he was making one anyway), which the three of us ate in front of Eastenders. And the year when my Northern boyfriend took me to the Lake District’s equivalent of Fawlty Towers and it rained incessantly. Then there was the year I had the flu, ruining the love-of-my life’s attempts to surprise me with home-cooked dinner and instead scaring the crap out of him when I appeared in the kitchen mid-way through his second verse of Ray Charles ‘I got a woman’ and causing him to throw too much Worcester sauce into his jerk chicken.

But this year is definitely going to be a good one. I can feel it. Royal mail are on alert, I have cleared out my inbox and Bill Gates has been warned. I might even take the day off work to help direct the lorries into the sorting depot I have hired. 2010 is the year that Operation L.O.V.E will finally come into fruition.

P.S – Get along to Switch it Up on Friday to bag a date…


Stuff I liked this week

Get gluing: http://www.marthastewart.com/photogallery/valentines-day-cards#slide_3

Not as good as a Blue Peter effort, but nevertheless gratefully received: http://www.moonpig.com/CardGallery/Greeting+Cards/keyword/ROMANTIC/gallery.aspx?adid=GUKPerLove09&gclid=CLjY9Oq9v58CFeZr4wod9HSR0g

Probably a better way to spend your hard-earned cash: https://www.oxfam.org.uk/donate/haiti-earthquake/index.php