Tim Dowling: my Valentine’s tales of woe

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/feb/21/valentines-day-disasters-tim-dowling

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It’s Valentine’s Day morning, and I am trying to manoeuvre a flatbed trolley around a stack of paint tins. My wife is behind me, speaking to a friend on her phone. “Flowers?” she says, loudly. “How lovely! You must be thrilled.”

“I need to back up,” I say.

“No, nothing,” my wife says. “Not even a card.”

“I did get you something,” I say. I say it quietly, because it’s a DVD box set and it hasn’t arrived.

“Romantic walk?! Are you joking?” my wife says. “We’re buying gravel in Homebase.”

“This excursion was not my idea,” I say.

“No,” my wife says, “we have no plans.”

“Yes, we do,” I say. “It’s haircut day.” This year, Valentine’s Day coincides with our quarterly appointment with Kelly and Hayley, the hairdressing twins who come to the house for a job-lot price. The oldest one has come home from university especially for his free haircut.

My wife finally gets off the phone after I’ve loaded all the gravel into the back of the car.

“They’re not doing anything, either,” she says as I climb into the passenger seat. “We might have dinner together.”

“At theirs or ours?” I ask.

“Dunno,” she says. “We could go out.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I say.

“Why not?”

“Because that line from my book, where I said that married couples shouldn’t go out on Valentine’s Day, is circulating on all these websites. And last week I went on the radio and said it again.”

“So what?” my wife says.

“It would be like when I wrote that I would never go into Tesco Express,” I say, “and then someone saw me in there buying a chicken breast.”

“Hang on,” she says, turning towards me. “Are you saying you’re too famous to go to a restaurant?”

“No, that’s not…”

“Shall I ring them back and say, ‘Sorry, but my husband is too famous to eat in public’?”

“It’s a matter of consistency,” I say.

After we get home, I am sent on to the supermarket, where the range of Valentine’s cards on offer is suboptimal. I buy one with cartoon puppies on the front that says “Love You Lots” inside. I also buy vodka. When I get home, the DVD box set I ordered is on the mat.

“I didn’t have time to wrap,” I say to my wife, “and I forgot to buy an envelope.”

“That is a truly horrible card,” she says.

“Love you lots,” I say. “Would you like a bloody mary?”

Kelly and Hayley arrive an hour later. Constance drops by to watch the family haircut. The children go first. By the time my turn comes, my wife’s hair is a helmet of foil flaps, and she’s on her second bloody mary. “Everyone’s shocked,” she says, pointing to my card. “I put it on Instagram.”

“So what are we doing?” says Kelly, picking up scissors.

“Make him look handsome,” Constance says.

“Kelly and Hayley are shocked,” my wife says.

“At least he got you a card,” Hayley says.

“And a box set,” I say.

Later on, I drop the oldest one and his girlfriend at the bus stop. When I get home, my wife and Constance are shouting at each other in the darkening sitting room. “Why are you still here?” my wife shouts.

“I’m leaving!” says Constance.

“You got to go! We’ve got people coming round.”

“They’re coming here?” I say.

My wife looks at me blankly, her hair short and streaked. She turns to Constance. “He told me he was too famous to go to a restaurant,” she says.

“Who?” Constance says.

They both turn to look at me.

“I think he’s funny,” my wife says.

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