Be My Valentine. Or Else.

To buy or not to buy, that is the question. Of course, it isn’t really a question at all. As any bloke who treasures his wedding tackle will know, this weekend of all weekends, NOT buying is a ticket to a night in the spare room rubbing antiseptic gel into ones sore goolies.

Yes, it’s Valentine’s Day again, the next Hallmark Card-sponsored event that sends us trooping off, sheep-like to the florists and chocolate emporiums, to buy cards adorned with teddy bears, bottles of pink champagne with helium balloons attached, and tip the maitre d to drag the violinist over to your table for a John Denver melody. The Horror, the horror.

Some of us hold out, citing the conspiracy by the greeting card companies to extract a little bit of pre-Easter cash from our hard-pressed wallets. We look into their eyes, and lower our voice: “If I want to tell you I love you, I don’t need to wait til February the 14th…”

“But you never bloody do!”

Nevertheless, Valentine’s Day for me remains a day of resentment and annoyance as women buy-in wholesale to this most blatant of all marketing cons (bettered only by Guinness’s monopolisation of St Patrick’s Day) The subject arose at a lunch with my parents at the weekend . Mum announced that she had never EVER received a Valentine’s card from dad (he’s my hero: they met in 1946 and married in 1953), then went on to recite word-for-word the poem inside the card that HE’D received from someone called Betty Todd while mum and dad were dating. WORD-FOR-WORD!! Nothing like a woman with a grudge.

Many men around these fair isles who usually take the ‘I’m not buying nothing’ approach will, I suspect have had their stubbornness tempered this year by the behaviour of a Mr. John Terry.  Mr. Terry is the captain of the England Football team and the UK press has been having a field day with the revelation that he’s gotten his mistress pregnant and paid for an abortion. OK, no big deal, you might say. What else should a juiced-up athlete be doing with his spare time? A choir boy next to Tiger Woods, who plays golf after all. But there’s more. The ‘lady’ in question happened to be dating another famous footballer at the time, who happened to be a friend and former teammate of Terry’s at Chelsea. And to cap it all, the crowning turd in the water tank, the pair of them were most likely due to fly out with the England team to this summer’s World Cup in South Africa.

Terry has, after a media witch-hunt, been stripped of the captaincy, but his former pal will probably pay for being cuckolded by being dropped from the team altogether (he’s not as good a player as Terry, you see). Meanwhile the subject of both their affections is selling her story to any tabloid newspaper that thinks its worth the cash to stump-up for a tawdry sleazy story. (All of them).

Now I don’t want to get into a debate about who-did-what-to-whom-and-where-and-how-hard? It seems to me it takes two to Rumba (or in this case three) and as much as shagging your mate’s missus is deplorable, the woman who is being pitied in the press and day-time TV as the wronged woman in all this, seems to me to be to be guilty of more than one misdemeanor herself.

But that, I’m afraid is a lost argument. For all the reasons you have and will read elsewhere on these pages, she will be seen by women, and therefore advertisers, and therefore newspaper and TV companies, as the victim. As more and more lurid details of the affair emerge, she’ll doubtless get a newspaper column, and maybe a book deal, then the film (starring Jennifer Aniston or  S-J Parker, who will bring their own well-documented woes to the part). As sure as night follows day, and Tiger follows Waitress, she will come out of it as Mrs. Squeaky Clean, while Mr. Terry will be lambasted throughout the land as a complete and utter cad (unless he scores the winning goal in the Final, of course ).

So forget arguing about it, mates. The pressure is on. Get your credit card out. Messrs Woods and Terry have given them all the ammo they need: We are all dirty, lying bastards, shagging ourselves senseless with the girl at work. But Sunday morning, after you cough up that dozen roses, just don’t go over the top. She’ll know you’re up to something.

-MIKE