MODERN ROMANCE...

A page from my Paris scrapbook.

All weekend, I was treated to (or subjected to, depending on your perspective) snippets of other people's St. Valentine's Day celebrations. On Friday night, sitting at a bar waiting for a friend I became vaguely aware of the couple sitting next to me. She had a small pile of unwrapped gifts resting on the bar next to her - most of which seemed to involve fuchsia marabou feathers. She was saying, "Oh, you didn't have to, really, you shouldn't have..." Then he said, "We're going to have romance, we're going to have fine wine, good food... And we're going to shag a bit."
I'm so glad I won't be in Paris this week.

For some reason the tube is where I make many of the observations about London life that I end up sharing here. Apologies in advance if anyone I mention is actually reading this and recognises themselves. I mean no judgement, it's merely observation/mild stalking.

This past weekend I noticed so many couples on tube escalators, gazing adoringly at each other, one step below the other, the female clutching one of those single red roses in plastic people try to sell you in restaurants. On the tube a couple shared (red!) ipod headphones and held on to each other as if their lives depended on it, centimetres away from me. I could only see the girl, who was wearing a cute woolly hat with knitted cat ears, sparkly green eyeshadow and silver shoes. The Curzon cinema in Soho on Sunday afternoon was a hotbed of coupledom (and laptops) - and here was the only sign of non-heterosexual celebration of Valentine's Day I saw in public at all. Weird, no? The vast majority of loveurs displaying their allegiance to the whole Valentine's thing were young, heterosexual and visually identifying strongly with the mainstream. On Sunday night I saw a girl waiting for a train dressed to kill in see-through plexiglass platform heels, bare legs and a red swishy mini skirt. She must have been freezing.

I do honestly find it fascinating to see all the tables at every restaurant divided into tables for two, couples diligently taking their places and ordering the lamb special with raspberry jus. And generally looking pretty miserable while doing so. I also wholeheartedly support florists in their work and they need this day to survive.
It would be nice to have a day to celebrate love, just not perhaps this one/this way. I'd be interested to know if anyone has come up with a way of doing Valentine's Day that isn't well, you know, that's a bit more my kind of thing. I know I never have, though I do enjoy observing the participants in a somewhat detached anthropological manner. (And OK, taking the piss a bit.)

Happy Valentine's Day!