Hilary Fannin: I’m downright hostile to romantic gestures

Thank goodness January has bitten the frozen dust. It’s time to get all chirpy and energised now, to rush around cleaning the mocking windows and washing the pungent dog blanket.

I was walking on the seafront the other day when the sun decided to come out. I risked peeling off a layer of padding to reveal my awfully nice, stripy, acrylic sweater, only to have an officious-looking little King Charles spaniel skid to a halt in front of me, its bulbous eyes staring in frozen horror. The damn dog was wearing the same sweater as I was (minus the attractive roll-neck), and the really sad thing is that it looked marginally better on that particular bitch.

Anyway, it’s barely February and the newsagents’ windows are already trimmed with helium hearts and puce-coloured haberdashery. Traditionally the month when retailers’ thoughts turn to the potential ching-ching of romance, the focus has shifted to bridal shows and bouquets and love-struck souls running around buying sentimental pieces of jewellery to fire at one another over the breakfast table when reality bites.

Unsurprisingly, maybe, given that Christmas fills me with fear and anxiety, Halloween makes me want to tear my lime-green and purple hair extensions out, and Easter often comes with a sheen of melancholy on its shiny foil wrapping, I am deeply ambivalent about Valentine’s Day. I’ve also come to suspect that “ambivalent” – a word I find creeping into my vocabulary like an unknown drunk into someone else’s party – actually means disliking something but being too cautious to say so. For example, if someone says, “Look, darling, I’ve bought a heliotrope matinee jacket and matching bonnet for the pooch – do you like it?”, this would be an occasion when the word ambivalent is not helpful. Just say no.

Romantic gestures

I’m suspicious of romance and downright hostile to romantic gestures, especially when they look like a scene from a Jennifer Aniston romcom. I remember a friend telling me how her former husband proposed by scooping her off her feet (quite literally) as they stood in a left-luggage queue and popping the question.

I’ve no idea what words he used, but I have met the man and it’s quite possible that the speech ran something along the lines of: “I’m nothing but a battered old suitcase without you. You alone hold the very small and easily displaceable key to my padlock.”

The girl was was swept off her feet, as I mentioned, and, without a moment’s hesitation, agreed to a lifetime of featuring in the B-movie of her putative husband’s rather bland life. The marriage eventually ended up being terminally misplaced.

Now I know there are always two sides to a story, but I’m only interested in one of them. He was a good-looking man (in a knitwear model-ish kind of way), one who relied on a diet of saccharine-soaked emotional highs to give his life meaning. He had to be loved like we love fluffy bunnies (preferably stuffed) and kittens that fall asleep on our knees.

In the cold light of day, with bills to pay and work to negotiate and a left-luggage lover who had started worrying about the rent money rather than whispering her devotion into his shell-likes, he stamped his little foot up and down and refused to get out of the sandpit. No longer his princess, she became the evil twin, the butt of his anger, the receptacle of all his childlike disappointment. She left him in the end.

Hearts and flowers wilt and combust. I trust something more quotidian:

“Where’s the shagging milk?”

“In the shagging carton.”

“Thanks.”

“Welcome.”

Sealed with a kiss

At this time of envelopes sealed with loving kisses, and warm prosecco, and boxes of Dairy Milk screwing up your diet, spare a thought for the sub-Antarctic king penguins that are being coerced into having sex with enormous, furry seals. These seals don’t even promise to call or text, they just shag a penguin and boogie on across the ice-floor. In most cases, the penguin manages to pick herself up and get on with her life; occasionally, however, the seal eats his date as a macabre post-coital snack.

Scientists are baffled. They just can’t understand it at all.

With respect, I suggest that they take their intelligent heads out of their camera hoods, decamp from the Antarctic for the weekend, and spend a night observing a Dublin taxi rank at 3am on a Saturday, where attempts at seal-like predatory and indiscriminate sexual behaviour are par for the bleedin’ course.

More helpful and edifying romantic tips next week.