Hugh Reilly: Celebrating St Valentine’s day is no easy task nowadays, with so many pitfalls to avoid

Published on Monday 13 February 2012 00:00

IT was only when I caught myself desperately flicking through the greeting cards rack in a Poundland emporium that I realised how price-sensitive I had become to buying a St Valentine’s Day card.

When I was an inbetweener, no expense was spared to impress Sian McNeill, a vision of beauty. A week’s pocket money plus cash scammed from doing my mother’s shopping allowed me to purchase a large padded card with ample room to pen slightly rude ditties.

Sian deserved the best; she was the only girl in the class who used a hankie, not her sleeve, to wipe her nose.

Unfortunately, my stammer and outrageously large cow’s lick put paid to any romance. “Beat it, creep!” she said when I enquired if she would like to accompany me to the youth club and share a hot chocolate.

I was eternally grateful she’d let me down gently.

Women are hopeless romantics and their driving skills are nothing to write home about either.

The female expects her lover to whisk her off to a swish Italian restaurant where Toni and Guiseppe have bumped up the prices to mercilessly fleece males who dare not question the bill.

When the perfumed object of desire is perusing the expensive wine list, it is considered bad form for the gentleman to say: “The house red looks superb.”

Similarly, if the woman is disappointed to receive a single off-crimson flower rather than the expected bouquet of red roses, her mood will not be improved by one saying: “I’m a less-is-more kind of a guy.”

Sending a Valentine card to an attractive co-worker is dicing with death. Most organisations have strict Sexual Harassment At Work policies thus a card filled with double entendre odes could end up being Exhibit A at an industrial tribunal.

These days, sending a card anonymously is regarded by some as borderline stalking behaviour, more so if the words inside the card have been cut and pasted from an old newspaper.

When I was a teacher, a pupil (female) sitting in the front row with a huge beamer placed a valentine card on my desk.

I found myself on the horns of a dilemma. If I threw the card in the bin, I faced being accused of humiliating the lassie. If I accepted the card, a visit to the General Teaching Council surely beckoned.

Luckily, the bell rang, the class departed and the matter was never discussed.

Happy St Valentine’s Day!

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Mr Super Bad

Wednesday, February 22, 2012 at 05:45 PM

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