Travel -- 2 days ago
Words: Violet
‘So,’ my friend Brains asked over our fourth glass of hangover petrol, ‘you seeing anyone special on Valentine’s?’ Well what did he expect? Of course I’m bloody not, although I might pass a bit of the evening posing in front of the mirror. Brains, who got dumped pretty badly recently, did of course have a plan:
‘I’m going to a Palentine’s,’ he announced rather grandly, ‘it’s this thing where a friend of mine gets a load of people round to her flat in Peckham and they get bare pissed.’ A house party, then?‘Nah, it’s different ‘cos you’re guaranteed sex, innit?’ Yum. ‘Wanna come?’ Rarely have the words ‘thanks, but no thanks’ left my mouth quite so fast.
But perhaps I shouldn’t have been so quick to judge. Brains’s plan may have been– how to put this diplomatically? – of niche interest, but was, if only in the basest possible form, a plan.
My Val’s days since leaving school are testament to my failure to think ahead. In 2008, I watched telly and ate baked beans on my own. I can’t remember what happened in 2009, but the likelihood is that it was a repeat of 2008’s heroic adventures. In 2010 and 2011 I was in Paris – not for any romantic reason, you dig, but because I was living alone doing a succession of really boring internships. In 2012 I think I watched telly again.
Last year me and my then-girlfriend resolved to ignore it completely. We wouldn’t do a Valentine’s ‘thing’ like go out for a forcibly romantic dinner or watch a soppy film, but neither would we stay at home; that would be too much like making a statement. So, obviously, we went out for dinner and watched a soppy film. You might think that sounds uncomfortably close to the very Valentine’s ‘thing’ we were out to avoid, but that would be ignoring the total void of logic behind the relationship in question. Either way, it was all terribly embarrassing and hideously expensive.
In my current state of ineligible bachelordom, though, Valentine’s is a proper worry. It feels clichéd to be cynical about the whole thing, but the idea of dressing up and sending singing cards to unsuspecting women is just a bit creepy, isn’t it?
Thus I’m caught between moaning and buying loads of plastic roses to distribute to random strangers outside Tube stations. I feel genuinely conflicted, and the ‘seasonal’ marketing that hits the Internet on the day doesn’t help a bit – today I have received declarations of love from no less than three mobile phone services and a whopping six online shopping platforms. My Spam folder must think I’m Casanova or something.
So I’m stumped. But hold on a minute, lads – I’ve got an idea.
It’s so simple that I’m just amazed it never occurred to me before. To my caffeine-crazed mind, there are only two solutions to this most appalling quandary. The first, of course, is alcohol. The second, although more difficult to acquire and significantly less interesting, is other people. I intend to find both of these things in a pub, and a very particular one at that.
This pub is to be found down a badly-lit back street in Bloomsbury, and walking through the door is like stumbling into a bad sitcom from the 1970s. It stinks of bleach (which is odd, seeing as it’s always so filthy) and the landlady has been having a very cheerful nervous breakdown for the last three years. There will be no couples there, let alone people on dates. But what the place lacks in romantic potential, it fully makes up for in bonhomie and cheap red wine. I’m going to make an evening of it – wanna come?
By Digby Warde-Aldam
