Love in a cold climate

Call me a killjoy, call me a stick-in-the-mud, but there's something about Valentine's Day that makes my teeth curl - in fact, no, everything about Valentine's Day makes my teeth curl. It's just a blatant money-making racket, as false and contrived as Christmas, and I won't be a target for a market-propelled Cupid's bolt.

What really gets to me is that feigned surprise as the bunch of roses is sprung on that special one: "For me? Ah, you shouldn't have!" Yeah, right, you shouldn't have, but only if you want to be the M in an S&M relationship.

And spare a thought for all those lonely souls out there who fought the good fight of love, and lost. How do you think they feel on "World Romance Day"? After all, there's nothing like a happy crowded room to make a sad heart lonely. I mean, come on, to hell with Sellafield and forget about Radon gas, if love is in the air, turn up the air conditioning, that's what I say. So, on Wednesday, in order to avoid the insanity of it all, I suggested that Jerome call over to my place for a few tidbits and that he bring along a video of his choice.

He arrived with two videos, Letter to Brezhnev and My Beautiful Laundrette, both low-budget products of 1985. I wasn't impressed by either film when they were first released, they just reminded me of my own dismal existence: dour, dark, cramped and a little too cold for comfort.

Back then, we had come through the liberating bin-liner garb of the late 1970s as punk was being diluted by new wave. It was a time when employment was but a concept and people were labelled "redundant". By the mid-1980s, the realisation had hit home that the recession was not going to end. So Jerome and I decided to take a boat to one of the small islands off the coast of Ireland - Great Britain. The choice was simple: a squat in London or an Anco course at home. It was pay-back day for John Bull and we were hammering on his door.

London was like little Eire; Gaelic, Guinness and the GAA were currency from the Angel all the way down to Brixton. Thatcher had succeeded in turning an Irish problem into an Irish crisis, not a prudent time to stir the "croppy" considering that hundreds of thousands of fit young Paddies and Patricias were just walking the streets with nothing better to do than find a banner to shelter under.

The "harsh love" of Thatcherism soon turned on its own people. Night after night, the charge of the heavy brigade was projected on screen into our hovels, as mounted police galloped into the valleys to do battle with miners. These were images that sent the masses rallying to the cause of the unemployed working-class. It seemed like law and order was fading faster than you could say "Kajagoogoo" as the battle lines were drawn between dispossessed people and possessed people. Some might even claim that this little archipelago of ours was on the brink of a new social order.

Despite the fact that they were days of poverty, immigration, Billy Bragg, boys from the blackstuff, factory closures and funny haircuts, they will for me, in a strange way, always be remembered as the good old days. And Jerome's choice of movies last Wednesday night captured that era wonderfully.

My Beautiful Laundrette is an exploration of two marginalised and polarised cultures in Thatcher-era London, with undertones of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Johnny (Daniel Day-Lewis), whose friends are staunch National Front supporters, adds complication to poverty in his life when he becomes romantically involved with Omar (Gordon Warnecke), the son of a Pakistani family with aspirations to join the middle-class.

You don't have to read the cover notes to see that this isn't going to be a match made in nirvana. It's difficult enough for the new romantics to express their hidden feelings, but with the added complication of indulging in a "love that dare not speak its name", this was never going to be an easy ride.

Although the film may have suffered because of budget constraints, it delivers a beautifully rendered portrait of two friends struggling to survive a racially tense and financially strapped 1980s Britain. Deservedly, it went on to be listed in the New York Times's top 10 films of 1986. But, oddly enough, the beauty of My Beautiful Laundrette now is to be found in the very aspect that I detested about the film when first I saw it all those years ago in a Brixton arts centre - it is a powerful vignette of its own time.

So there we were last Wednesday night, myself and Jerome supping Cabernet Sauvignon by the crateful. We didn't bother watching Letter to Brezhnev, we just indulged memories of our shared past: hard times, happy times, old friends living and dead. We talked and laughed and once or twice we paused out of respect, and then we talked some more - on into the early hours of Thursday morning until Valentine's Day was well and truly tucked away for another year.

But a strange thought occurred to me: in our mad drive to escape from World Romance Day, maybe, despite ourselves, we celebrated it in its purest form - two old friends re-establishing a past and looking forward to a future.