New and cute!

less new but still cute!

I was talking to someone today who reckoned that Valentine’s Day is sheer commercial crassness, a rip-off that she is not prepared to participate in. (In the middle of the conversation her husband phoned to wish her a happy day.) For me and Anne, there is the minor fact that it was instrumental in our getting together. I’ve related part of this story before, but I left out the Valentine’s day bits. And since asked, and has elaborated on her less good Valentine’s days, I should mention the following hitherto concealed details:

My good friend Q and I had agreed that if neither of us had managed to score by Valentine’s Day 1990, we would go out for a consolatory dinner with each other. He had been sounding fairly optimistic, but called on the Monday to let me know that the girl he’d invited out for dinner on the Wednesday (V-Day itself) had backed out due to pressure of academic work, so our deal was still on.

Q and I had a jolly good Valentine’s day dinner. The waiter obviously thought that we were a gay couple and kept on winking at us; very sweet. On the way home we actually bumped into the girl who he had originally been supposed to have dinner with; she didn’t look very much under pressure of academic work, but did suddenly look extremely guilty when she spotted us.

A few days later I had the opportunity to raise the matter with the girl in question. “No,” she said, “I’m not really interested in him. You’d be a different matter.” The moment wasn’t quite right, as my ex-girlfriend, with who I had once been very much in lurve, was staying with her that evening; but I pursued matters the next day, to a happy conclusion. (And my ex-girlfriend eventually married Q.)