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Blue Valentine
Feb. 14th, 2007 08:55 amOne not to tell the girlfriend.
"I bought the wife a new belt and bag for Valentine's Day"
"That's nice."
"Yep, the Hoover works perfectly, now."
+++++++++++++++
Valentine's Day, I feel, must have been invented by women. I say this not because "stuff" is involved, but because of its sheer impracticality. It's no use taking the wife/girlfriend to a £200-a-head restaurant on the 15th. It has to be on the 14th. And it's no use getting the flowers delivered on the 13th. No, it has to be on the 14th. While people hang around, offering cheap services, for 95% of the year, the bloke gets stuck with paying 4 or 5 times over the odds, because any other day than the 14th "just isn't romantic".
Of course, this offends every sensiblity of the cost-conscious bloke, but he knows that, in this particular case, argument is futile. No, not futile, but positively counter-productive. Just the merest hint of "I couldn't get a table for the 14th, would Saturday be okay?" and you will be getting the cold stare treatment for weeks.
Bah, humbug.
+++++++++++++++
About 20 years ago, if a bloke was seen apparently talking to himself in the street, you just categorised him as "nutter" and carried on. Then, suddenly, more and more people were seen doing it, occasionally gesticulating wildly. Yes, the mobile phone and then the earpiece with microphone attached to the lapel, had arrived.
So, this morning, I was only mildly surprised, when walking the short distance to the station, to have a person no more than 10 feet behind me, talking away. Except, well, I don't like it -- particularly at 6.15 in the morning, when I am used to a bit of personal space. So I adopted a strategy I frequently use these days when someone is walking behind me a little too closely, or is walking behind me and wittering away into a mobile phone.
I stopped walking.
Not slowly, so the guy could "overtake". Just a complete, sudden, apparently irrational, halt. And the bloke walked past me, giving me a bit of a look (which, naturally, I returned, utterly unabashed), and then carried on. And, well, would you have believed it, he wasn't on the phone. But he was still talking away.
It quite took me back to my youth and the days of nutters on the top decks of buses, chattering happily away amidst the swirling cigarette smoke of the time that they met Napoleon, or Hitler, or Jim Callaghan.
"I bought the wife a new belt and bag for Valentine's Day"
"That's nice."
"Yep, the Hoover works perfectly, now."
+++++++++++++++
Valentine's Day, I feel, must have been invented by women. I say this not because "stuff" is involved, but because of its sheer impracticality. It's no use taking the wife/girlfriend to a £200-a-head restaurant on the 15th. It has to be on the 14th. And it's no use getting the flowers delivered on the 13th. No, it has to be on the 14th. While people hang around, offering cheap services, for 95% of the year, the bloke gets stuck with paying 4 or 5 times over the odds, because any other day than the 14th "just isn't romantic".
Of course, this offends every sensiblity of the cost-conscious bloke, but he knows that, in this particular case, argument is futile. No, not futile, but positively counter-productive. Just the merest hint of "I couldn't get a table for the 14th, would Saturday be okay?" and you will be getting the cold stare treatment for weeks.
Bah, humbug.
+++++++++++++++
About 20 years ago, if a bloke was seen apparently talking to himself in the street, you just categorised him as "nutter" and carried on. Then, suddenly, more and more people were seen doing it, occasionally gesticulating wildly. Yes, the mobile phone and then the earpiece with microphone attached to the lapel, had arrived.
So, this morning, I was only mildly surprised, when walking the short distance to the station, to have a person no more than 10 feet behind me, talking away. Except, well, I don't like it -- particularly at 6.15 in the morning, when I am used to a bit of personal space. So I adopted a strategy I frequently use these days when someone is walking behind me a little too closely, or is walking behind me and wittering away into a mobile phone.
I stopped walking.
Not slowly, so the guy could "overtake". Just a complete, sudden, apparently irrational, halt. And the bloke walked past me, giving me a bit of a look (which, naturally, I returned, utterly unabashed), and then carried on. And, well, would you have believed it, he wasn't on the phone. But he was still talking away.
It quite took me back to my youth and the days of nutters on the top decks of buses, chattering happily away amidst the swirling cigarette smoke of the time that they met Napoleon, or Hitler, or Jim Callaghan.
