Dozy Writes

It’s Valentine’s Day this month which you may have noticed from the heart-shaped gifts that are currently littering our shops. It’s hard to avoid.

Valentine’s Day is a peculiar affair – I find the forced displays of love and affection both cringeworthy and jarring. 

This is never so apparent as when you walk past a restaurant on the 14th of February and see hordes of couples packed cheek to cheek with their fellow Valentine revellers. 

There seems to be very little engagement or conversation, just an air of general awkwardness as they realise that they have nothing to talk about.

This feeling is further exacerbated by the fact that they are paying a premium price to publicly demonstrate how much they are still in love with each other despite their lack of conversation.

It doesn’t seem like a great advertisement for love.

The present giving for Valentine’s Day also annoys me. I don’t particularly want flowers and chocolates – well, I want the chocolates but preferably just a bar of my favourite brand rather than a selection box where I don’t like half of the options. I mean, who wants coffee creams?!

Equally, I love flowers but nowadays I prefer to see them growing in a garden or in the countryside. Whenever I receive cut flowers, I invariably forget to top them up with water so they sit in the vase, shrivelled and dried out, until I remember to throw them away.

For me, Valentine’s Day always feels more like a teenage celebration than something that I have wanted to engage in as an adult.

Sending a Valentine’s card

I haven’t always been so disagreeable when it comes to celebrating Valentine’s Day.

During my teens I sent my fair share of Valentine’s cards and I remember spending hours inscribing a variety of poems on the card and the envelope.

You may remember some of them:

Postie, postie, do not falter, this could lead me up the altar.

–ooo–

Roses are red, violets are blue, sugar is sweet, and so are you

–ooo–

S.W.A.L.K. – Sealed with a loving kiss

–ooo–

Over time, the poetry evolved according to my desire to shock. The rhymes, once so chaste, changed to:

Violets are blue

Roses are red

Take off your clothes

And take me to bed!

–ooo–

A swan’s a swan

A duck’s a duck

What’s a kiss

Without a …?

–ooo–

N.O.R.W.I.C.H. – (K)nickers off ready when I come home

–ooo–

I remember writing my first Valentine’s card at the tender age of 12. Thankfully, the poetry was still very innocent at that point.

The recipient of this card was a friend of my pal’s boyfriend and we were about to embark on a blind date.

An awkward Valentine

I was excited. Not only was this the first Valentine’s card that I was giving to someone, it was also my first blind date – as you might expect given that I was only 12.

My pal and her boyfriend were keen ice skaters as was my date, so it was agreed that we would go to the ice rink.

One thing you need to know about me: I am terrified of falling, especially on ice. I had once heard a story of someone who fell whilst ice skating and whilst they were lying immobilised on the ice, someone skated over their splayed fingers thus resulting in said fingers being amputated.

This fear meant that I had rarely been to the ice rink, making the decision to go ice skating on a first date completely ridiculous.

I had never met this lad before, I hadn’t even seen a photo of him as we couldn’t take digital photos in those days, instead we had to wait anything from three days to a month for our photos to be developed depending on how flash we were with our cash.

When I did meet this lad, I couldn’t help but be disconcerted by the terrible haircut he was sporting. It was a mullet, a style which was common at the time, but this wasn’t the kind of mullet that Jason Donovan wore which was stylish and attractive. Oh no, this was more one where he looked like a lawnmower had run over him leaving the hair on the top of his head sticking up in unruly tufts. 

It’s only fair to point out that I was sporting an equally hideous hairstyle which involved a perm but it was fashionable therefore it was acceptable.

After my pal and her boyfriend introduced us, they skated off, holding hands as they moved across the ice rink with ease.

I handed the Valentine’s card over to my date which he accepted with some surprise and a little bit of embarrassment as he hadn’t written a card for me.

We exchanged awkward pleasantries which included me telling him that I hadn’t skated much before.

Holding on for dear life

We started to skate around the perimeter of the rink but our progress was hampered by my insistence on clinging to the side as I moved my feet awkwardly back and forth like a chicken scratching in the dust.

Despite my warnings about my lack of skating ability, I could see his dismay as he realised just how clumsy I was on the ice.

The awkwardness of our conversation was not aided by the amount of concentration I had to give in order to remain upright and avoid the loss of any fingers. 

Whenever I tried to concentrate on what he was saying, I would find myself being struck afresh by the awfulness of his mullet, the shock of which seemed to increase the likelihood of me falling. 

It was an ever decreasing circle of viciousness –  a somewhat ironic description as I could barely skate forwards, never mind in circles. 

It was apparent that we had absolutely nothing in common and we weren’t attracted to each other in any shape or form. 

Eventually, my date made his apologies and moved off to have a ‘proper skate’ and I found the nearest exit and hobbled over to a bench, happy to have escaped the torture of both ice rink and mullet.

Unsurprisingly we didn’t see each other again.

My first Valentine’s card

Undeterred by my disastrous blind date, I continued with my search for teenage love which was always amplified around Valentine’s Day. 

However, despite sending many Valentine’s cards over the years – many with questionable forms of poetry contained within – I had yet to receive one myself.

This may be surprising to some people because I was quite attractive and a fairly confident person but I never seemed to be in a relationship around Valentine’s Day which was one way of guaranteeing receipt of a card.

I also suspect that my independent nature and confident approach may have been off-putting to a potential beau.

An example of this independent nature occurred when I was fourteen or fifteen. I had a boyfriend who lived in a small town where the attitudes were a little bit more– let’s say traditional.

My boyfriend and I bumped into a couple of his friends. After exchanging greetings, one of his pals looked at me and then asked my boyfriend, ‘What’s your bird’s name?’

Before my boyfriend had a chance to reply I furiously interjected, ‘This bird’s name is Donna and she can speak for herself.’

The lad just laughed and, still addressing my boyfriend, said, ‘Ooh, she’s a feisty one isn’t she?’

My boyfriend had to drag me away, fearful that I might end up punching his friend.

It will come as no surprise to learn that our relationship only survived a few more weeks.

After that, I suspect that I may have developed a reputation for being ‘feisty’ which may have been why, by the time I hit the age of nineteen, I still hadn’t received a Valentine’s card and I was feeling pretty fed up about it. 

All that was about to change.

A new guy to flirt with

A new guy, S.G., had started at my work and sparks had immediately flown between us.

The way our shifts worked meant that we only saw each other for four hours every Saturday, but we packed as much flirting into that time as we possibly could.

A couple of months later, in the run up to Valentine’s Day, we were talking with our colleagues about plans for the day, and I mentioned that I had never received a Valentine’s card. S.G. was surprised by my admission but didn’t say much more.

On the Saturday before Valentine’s Day, at the end of his shift, he beckoned me over and handed me a card with strict instructions not to open it until the 14th.

I can’t explain how excited I was knowing that I had received my first Valentine’s card. It was also a step forward in our flirting. We both knew that him giving me this card meant that we were moving onto the next level.

We both had plans to go out with our friends that evening so we compared notes about the pubs and clubs we expected to be in, casually aligning ourselves without planning it outright.

Naturally, I opened the card as soon as he left and I was chuffed to discover it was indeed a Valentine’s card and not some cruel joke which for some reason I had an underlying fear about.

I went out that evening with a sense of incredible excitement. I could hardly believe that after months of flirting, S.G. and I were finally going to get together.

Our first kiss

We saw each other a couple of times during the night, him leaving a pub with his friends just as I was arriving but finally, we ended up in the same club.

Oasis were singing in the background, prophetically telling us to “Roll With It” so we quit flirting and started kissing and it was…

… kind of weird.

Suddenly, we became uncomfortable and awkward around each other, something we had never been before. It was as if turning our flirtation into a reality was too much for us to handle.

Needing a little bit of breathing space from the weirdness, we both went off to spend time with our friends and it was whilst I was with my pal that I bumped into F.H., a guy I had met just over a month prior. He had intrigued me greatly but I had felt too self conscious to ask for his phone number. 

It turned out that F.H. was equally intrigued by me, telling me that he’d been back to the club a few times looking for me. He wasted no time in inviting me out on a date for Valentine’s Day.

I barely had time to process this offer when S.G. came along to find me. He looked at me quizzically, trying to work out the situation between me and F.H. and I found myself feeling completely bamboozled. 

I had gone from never having received a Valentine’s card or having a boyfriend to celebrate Valentine’s Day with, to suddenly having two possible Valentines showing an interest in me at exactly the same time. 

Oh cruel world, why would you do this to me!

I looked between them as my mind weighed up the options. I liked both of them a lot although they were very different in personality and looks. 

The recent awkwardness with S.G. had disappeared – apparently being part of a possible love triangle will do that – and suddenly I wanted nothing more than to be with him.

But F.H. was so alluring, there was a mystery about him that I was finding hard to resist. 

It felt like a seminal moment. As if the choice I made at this point would shape the rest of my life.

Who was I going to choose?

You’ll have to wait until next week to find out.