Valentine's Day

Valentine’s Day is one of the most ridiculous days on the calendar. Aside from the marketing aspect, the most ridiculous thing is the specific focus on romantic love. Valentine’s Day would be less of a farce if it were a more general concept, which celebrated all forms of love. What about family love? Or the love of friends? Or my obsessive love of David Bowie? It would be refreshing to appreciate love that is not conventional.

The phrase ‘other half’ to describe a partner is, I think, destructive to our own concept of who we are. You are you: you are not half of you waiting for someone to come along and make you whole. Being in a relationship does not suddenly make your life all glitter and pickles. To anyone that feels they need to be completed by another human being, it seems it would be wise to fill that space with some self-confidence and dignity first, and not another similarly clueless person.

Refrain from buying flowers this year – they are awfully predictable, and there's nothing quite like chocolates and perfume to tell someone: "You're fat and you smell like shit." In fact, buying is not necessary at all. The less that is spent, the better: make them a card, write them a brooding sonnet, make a life-sized model of them out of papier-mache, send one of their eyelashes into space, choreograph a croissant mime routine… or make them a cup of tea. Anything that you feel adequately expresses your love for that person, thing or place. After all, Valentine’s Day is about love, not money… isn’t it?

This year, at the very least, I would like to see a Valentine’s Day in which I didn’t have to witness the two opposing clichéd camps of ‘smug couples’ and ‘bitter singles’. Although actually, I'll be on an aeroplane for Valentine's Day, so I won't have to witness the forcibly sentimental monstrosity that is the 14th of February.

For those of you that have to face reality... good luck, I suppose... and get working on those mime routines.