Valentine’s day has always annoyed me a bit.  As a late-blooming teenager I had always hoped that an anonymous card would find its way through my letterbox intented for my spotty four-eyed face, but it never did.  One year an anonymous card did appear, but it was addressed to Billy Burn who lived at the other end of my road.  A set up most likely… possibly by Billy himself, more likely by somebody else who wanted a cheap laugh.  I can’t remember whether I delivered it or not, I hope in hindsight that I stuffed it into the exhaust-pipe of his dad’s car, but that’s unlikely.

Since starting on the sordid path of dating, it’s just gone from one extreme to the other… lavender-filled balloons and cheesy teddybears with crappy slogans like ‘You to me are like a spanner; every time I see you, my nuts tighten‘ were given to my by fellas who wanted to know what colour my knickers were, and when I finally hooked up with TAT, I got little or nothing.  I prefer little or nothing by far.

This year, Laughingboy showed his love for me by producing a hefty dump in his nappy in the small hours of the morning.  When I checked his schoolbag for baby-wipes, I found a sweet glitterish heart-shaped card with painty fingerprints all over it, and a wee bag of homemade chocolates.  I let Puppychild show her love for her daddy by jumping on him violently at 5pm to wake him up for his night-time shift.  TAT showed his love for me by reading me excerpts from Bill Bryson’s ‘The Lost Continent’ while I scraped eggy gunge from lunchtime kitchen saucepans, and I showed him my love for him by buying him an extremely violent Xbox game – ‘Army of Two, the 40th day’ – a shoot-em-up game that can only be played by in co-op with another.  (What could be more romantic than annihalating things together over a glass of wine?)

I will be celebrating my love for myself tonight by lying on the wooden floor and listening to John Coltrane surrounded by candles for an hour or two before digging into a can of Guinness and a game of Assassin’s Creed.

Hallmark didn’t get a brass cent.  Ha.