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ROMANTIC GESTURES

MY HUSBAND is compliant, but also fairly Bah, Humbug about Valentine’s Day. In theory, this is because he doesn’t appreciate being told when he should buy flowers or deliver love notes. But, in practice, would there be flowers or cards without that societal nudge?

Of course, as romantic gestures go, organising a spring bouquet or getting in Valentines’ steaks are fairly pedestrian compared with the heroics of lovers of Greek legend. Can you compare a trip to the florist’s with Leander swimming the Hellespont or Orpheus’s descent to the Underworld to find Eurydice?

There are some effortful romantic gestures in fiction — Gatsby buying a gin palace opposite his childhood sweetheart’s home, for example — but also some admirably unshowy ones. What makes Pride And Prejudice’s Mr Darcy such a hero is not his good looks and vast estate, but the discretion with which he works to limit the potentially ruinous fall- out from Lydia Bennet’s elopement with Wickham.

In Bridget Jones: The Edge Of Reason, his Nineties counterpart, barrister Mark Darcy, makes tireless efforts to overturn our hapless heroine’s wrongful conviction and imprisonment in a Thai jail for drugs trafficking. It is these actions that rehabilitate him as a hero.

Sometimes the stakes are so high, only a grand gesture will do. John Green’s weepie The Fault In Our Stars is about two U.S. teenagers who meet in a support group for cancer sufferers. After Hazel introduces Augustus to her favourite author — an elusive Dutchman — Augustus organises a trip to Amsterdam through the Make-A-Wish charity.

When I was a teenager, I read Ernest Hemingway’s tragic romance A Farewell To Arms in a kind of fervour, especially the scenes in which American Henry and his English girlfriend, Catherine, flee war-torn Italy.

Perhaps those grander romantic gestures are the preserve of the young. On Friday, I’ll happily settle for dinner and a movie at home. But flowers would be lovely.