My hatred of Valentine’s Day began at boarding school. Having noted out of a classroom window the arrival of the village florist’s van, everyone would dash back to their house, as we did every day at 11am to swap books and eat our biscuit allowance. Of course on this particular February day biscuits were the last thing on our minds. There would be a rush through the door to the console table that usually had our mail laid out on it, except that you couldn’t really tell it was a console table, since it looked like a large floating arrangement of roses. These were rifled through quite ferociously, unless someone took it upon themselves to distribute them in a sensible fashion, and pushed in the direction of the recipient, whose friends invariably squealed in delight, desperate to know who they were from. As the pile of roses got smaller, and I realised that, yet again, I was to be disappointed (only marginally better than being humiliated by a ‘joke Valentine’, usually sent by some arrogant twerp from the First Team) I usually backed away into my study to devour the entire packet of forgotten stidges (as biscuits were called in school lingo) and listen to Your Tune on Radio One.
It wasn’t the annual experience of disappointment that made me hate V-Day- I was a teenager after all. What used to infuriate me was the fact that the bulk of the flowers went to the most popular girl in our house. This girl always had a boyfriend (usually the aforementioned First Team Twerp) who always sent the appropriate gift, and a veritable squadron of admirers who spent good money sending her flowers, thinking about what to write on the card, only for her to laugh at their tokens and throw them in the bin as if they mattered not a jot. I felt so cross on their behalf. And so guilty when I saw them across the Quad, or sat with them at mealtimes. This was the feeling that I came to associate with V-Day as a teenager; the reason that I hated it so much that I made sure that I was never ‘in a relationship’ on 14th February. One year, quite by chance, my mother and I ended up in West London and in need of food. We ducked in to a local restaurant and it was only when the main courses were cleared that we realised we were surrounded by amorous couples. We howled with laughter all the way home-how sad we must have looked, mother and daughter eating out on Valentine’s Day!
I was therefore a little unsure about how to handle V-Day when I met DH, who was barely a DB at that point. He invited me to his flat for dinner as I seemed less than keen to go out to eat ( I distinctly recall giving him a lecture on refusing to patronise restaurants who think that it’s OK to charge over-the-odds for some schmaltzy meal just because of a notion of ‘love’.) He cooked a fabulous meal- Thai Peanut Chicken if I recall correctly- and showered me with gifts…all the more impressive given that he had only known me for six weeks and managed to choose the perfect necklace (I later wore it on our wedding day.) It was my first proper Valentine’s Day and I felt so special. I have felt special every day since then, which is more important than going for some over-priced meal or buying some over-priced flowers. We married on 18th February almost two years ago, so V-Day has taken a back-seat yet again in our lives, but there is always a card, always a gift, and always a remembrance of how my wonderful husband has changed my opinion, and my life.
