Happy Valentine’s (or Galentine’s) Day to you

IT’S easy to be cynical, dismissive and just a big fat killjoy about all things Valentine’s Day. Well it’s easy for me anyway. The annoying thing is Valentine’s Day should just be a little annual reminder to get all gushy with your loved one, or ones (I don’t judge) but instead as we all know, it has become a hellish Hallmark tack-fest with its bouquets of sad/bad taste and ‘romantic’ three course menus of misery that begin with a complimentary glass of lady petrol and end with a pathetic slice of cheesecake with a blob of coulis shaped more like a gallbladder than a heart on a plate.

Personally, I choose to ignore it, in fact one year I ignored it so successfully that I planned a dinner with one of my favourite cousins (I have many excellent cousins) on Valentine’s Day. Both of us are oblivious single laydees, me in my 30s and she in her 60s, and so felt baffled when on a random Tuesday night there was such a queue for the Thai place we like. I remember picking up some weird vibes in the pub where we sat close sinking a few jars afterwards but it was only as I was merrily meandering to the bus stop later and saw a young girl with a single broken rose strangled in cellophane and mascara running down her face that it dawned on me it was February 14 and I had just enjoyed a Valentine’s dinner date with my own kin.

Now — to offset the romantic pressure of Valentine’s we have silly, but not totally stupid, precursor Galentine’s Day (which all Parks and Recreation fans will know really did start as a joke). Galentine’s, on the 13th, is a day to celebrate female friendships, again no bad thing on it’s own if it didn’t come with awful merch, memes and a girls’ outing for the most confusing of all meals — brunch.