(BROKEN) HEARTS AND (WILTED) FLOWERS

I didn’t feel very positive for much of this last weekend (you may have noticed) and it was a tough one to get through. The darkness seeped into my soul again and everything got a little bleak and seemed very pointless. I came within a smidgen of pressing the keys that would delete all traces of Lesser Blogfordshire from history and remove myself from the increasingly irritating world of FizzBok to crawl back under my rock and hide for another decade or so. The fact that I didn’t actually do that and instead chose to delete some of the bleaker content of my previous post (And it was grim, grim stuff. You may think I’ve written dark thoughts before, but this took the cake, the biscuit and the whole damned bakery along with it…) and publish it instead means that I guess that I’m going to have to admit that deep down I must have a glimmer of hope, which, I suppose is something worth discovering about yourself. Instead I gave Lesser Blogfordshire a bit of a facelift, in that cosmetic corporate way that means that nothing’s really changed but we hope you won’t notice it, decided to try not to take it quite so seriously any more when nobody comes a-calling and, in the best of British traditions, thought I’d better just “Keep Calm and Carry On…”.

I’m not the easiest of people to get along with. In fact I’m willing to admit to being a bit of an odd cove. Once, when I was terribly, terribly lonely, I got given a Valentine’s card by a colleague of mine to cheer me up, and I was ridiculously ungracious about the matter, and got ludicrously angry that someone was probably just mocking my then lifestyle, when all they were trying to do was make me feel a bit better on what is truly an epically miserable day for an awful lot of the sad souls who we share this little blue planet with. Of course, back in those days, I did feel very emotionally raw. I’d only really had one “successful” relationship in back then, with a girl who’d slept with most of my “friends” and with whom I’d finally split up after coming home and finding her in flagrante delicto with a bloke called N… N… (I still struggle with the name…) Nigel. Ultimately they ended up being very happy and very respectable, so I suppose the subsequent ten years that I spent as an emotional wreck with trust issues, and my continuing cynicism was a small price for them to pay. I guess I do still look at supposedly respectable people in an odd way even now, and wonder how many people they’ve walked on over the years, so that their feet didn’t have to touch the ground as they trod that well-worn path towards respectability and it’s something you should think about next time you’re talking to your doctor, or a schoolteacher, bank manager or therapist or any other pillar of the community you might happen to meet. They’ve all got things they’d rather you didn’t know about hidden in their pasts. Mind you, ultimately I’m very grateful to them, because without all that angst, I’d never have found the beloved, so out of the most horrible experiences some good will eventually come.

Still, that’s a lovely story for a Valentine’s Day morning, isn’t it? I guess you’ll have guessed by now that I’m not the day’s biggest fan. It shouldn’t matter, it shouldn’t be that important, but to a lot of people, well, it seems that it is, and if you are alone, or you don’t feel that you number amongst the superficially so-called “beautiful” people of society (I’d rather spend my time with a beautiful mind…), it can be one of the most gut-wrenchingly awful days of the year as you have to sit and watch the unfolding awful spectacle of deliveries coming to the desk alongside you where that oh-so-humble-yet-terrifically-popular colleague gets all the attention again and then spends all day tomorrow telling you, with that oh-so-pitying “poor old you” look in  their eyes, what a terrific night they had, and how lucky they are and telling you that “you’ll find someone one day” as you sit there hoping that their computer screen will spit glass in their eye. As a nation we spend hundreds of millions of pounds being guilted into supporting this ridiculous charade of a day which has basically just been designed and built up to over significance by marketing people to sell a lot of pointless cards, chocolates and flowers. In a lot of cases we buy into this just because we feel we ought to not because we actually want to, and we don’t want feel as if we might disappoint someone or leave them feeling left out. And the kids gets suckered into it at such a young age, too. Surely we should be teaching them something less shallow than this. That love is a precious and special thing and it shouldn’t be something that you compartmentalise into one day of the year, it should be for every single day, and before someone tells me that there’s no harm in it, look around you at those people who find this a truly horrible day and spare them a thought as you blunder on in your own self absorbed “me-fest”. It is good to have a day in the year that makes you feel special.

That’s what your birthday is for.