Valentine's Day: Thank goodness this year we'll be spared the worst of the mother-of-all arbitrary days – Stephen Jardine

Picture the scene. In the offices of a company making verruca ointment, the poor souls who have ended up in that particular line of work are puzzling over how to get noticed.

One of the few upsides of the lockdown is you don't have to go to a restaurant for Valentine's Day, says Stephen Jardine (Picture: Philippe Hays/AFP via Getty Images)

No one seems interested in their product, even though it deals with warts well. What can they do to get attention? Eureka, choose an upcoming date and christen it National Verruca Day.

At the very least, Jeremy Vine will devote 20 minutes to the subject on Radio 2 and Buzzfeed will run a story on “20 Celebrities You Didn’t Know Have Verrucas”.

That is the power of the national day. There is only one problem. Our friends fighting verrucas will struggle to find an available date in the calendar because they’ve all been taken up.

Today is National Cheddar Day and National Tortellini Day. You would have though the organisers could get together and make it National Cheesy Pasta Day but instead they will battle in out for attention in print and on the airwaves. You can decide who wins.

Pity the fools making cream-filled chocolates and rotating fairground rides because they have really messed up. Tomorrow is National Ferris Wheel Day and National Cream Filled Chocolates Day but they might as well give up the fight for attention now because they are competing with the big one, Valentine’s Day.

It is the mother-of-all arbitrary days, sending ripples through the calendar as soon as Christmas is over for another year. In normal times, the shops would be filled with cards and heart-shaped balloons and florists would be entreating us to part with the cost of a small car for a dozen red roses flown in from Africa.

By now, restaurants would all be booked up. Well, all the good restaurants anyway. You can usually get a mid-afternoon table at McDonalds on February 14 but a Big Mac surrounded by sulky teenagers is unlikely to deliver the romantic atmosphere desired on this occasion.

The realisation that you have left it too late to make a reservation for Valentine’s Day is always painful but also pointless because the last place any sane person wants to be on February 14 is in a restaurant.

Without any fun bigger tables, every eating place becomes a ghastly succession of tables for two, going through the motions, all in the name of a third century clergyman who is also the patron saint of epilepsy.

And it doesn’t matter how hard you try, someone will always outdo you on Valentine’s Day. Years ago, I thought I’d done well booking a restaurant and picking up some flowers to hand over on the night. That was fine except the bloke at the next table produced a Hamilton and Inches bracelet to great approval and just as we were leaving, another man got down on bended knee and proposed.

This year we are spared any of that. With restaurants closed, 2021 is the year of the DIY Valentine’s celebration. Since most couples have spent the past ten months staring at each other across the same table, that is going to be a challenge.

Perhaps instead of going to a big effort you could just remind your beloved that Monday is Singles Awareness Day so they should think themselves lucky to have you at all.

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