Valentine's Day - The Re-branding of a Popular Festival or The Valentine’s Day Cunning Stunt
In hope of a Valentine’s Day with some actual human company, Paul Knight resorts to attending a singles’ night at a local pub...
"I really REALLY love you..."
February comes once more in winds and rains and yet again Valentine’s Day rears its surgically enhanced head. Of all the popular festivals it is the one I loathe the most. Its trappings fill me with rage. A teddy bear clutching a heart, fat little children with wings, pink things in abundance; little chocolate kisses and streamers all fill me with a lust for violent murder. Flowers are ok. Apart from the fact that I, like many people do not find the symptoms of hay-fever romantic, either in myself or others. Flowers are ok because they’re the one concession to sacrifice we’re allowed to make in today’s society.
Ok, but not great, fellas. You are making a gesture of sacrifice for your loved one. “I love you, and I have killed these for you, or have had them killed at great expense” and so on. Not terribly impressive, you might go so far as to say. A flower? Try to be a little more creative. Van Gogh, in a fit of artistic passion, cut off his ear. Flowers? Say it with a body part. “I love you, and to show you that I love you, and the sacrifices I am willing to make for this relationship, have cut off my own ear. Here it is. I have also painted you a flower.” Wow. You must really love me. Let’s get you to hospital and close that wound, babe.
But no. Pink streamers will out, the yearly triumph of the fat little wing-ed children; Botticelli has a lot to answer for and no doubt we will all go through the hateful rigmarole of swingers parties and white lightning once again. Because it’s all about getting laid, obviously. Folk festivals always are. Look at Mayday for crying out loud. A troupe of twelve year old girls tying ribbons around a big prick. This is good, as it has mythic resonance. But let’s at least be honest. It’s all about getting laid. Which is fine, just as long as you do; but what if you, like me, will return home to your single bed alone, and wake up on February the 15th with a salty, wet pillow. A single bed is a state of mind; it says that you expect to wake up alone.
I have had nearly a year to try to put my life back in order, but the wounds incurred last year have not yet fully healed. I am left to madly finger the bloody gash in solitary confinement.
Many of you will have had a perfectly satisfactory Valentine’s experience last year, possibly with oral sex. Good for you. Here’s how mine went.
Having spent the day off work staring at an empty doormat and drinking gin from a teapot like a Dickensian prostitute, I took myself to a singles’ night in the back room of a pub I know, assuring myself that this year, this year I would take someone, anyone, back home with me. My single bed had been prepped during the day with new sheets and little minty sweets on the pillow. Nothing in the world says ‘class’ like an imperial mint. As it happened, later on I enjoyed them both, between racking, animal sobs.
The pub staff had gone to some considerable trouble to ensure that their night would go with a swing. As I walked in, fashionably late at 7.30, I noticed the bakelite statue of Cupid and complementary sachets of water based lubricant at every table. Strangely, each table seemed to have only one chair set at it. Clearly the landlord had a good understanding of his clientele. Most of the chairs were already filled with heavy set panting, wild eyed males, expelling gases noxiously they turned as one man, unspeaking, to stare at me. One of them seemed to be gnawing on Cupid’s bakelite arm and whimpering as he jacked off into pint of strong, dark ale.
What is it with Cupid? Whose idea was it to symbolise romantic love with a fat boy with wings and a bow and arrow? Had to be a woman. I can see it now. Valentine’s Day rolls round again, and already I can feel his little prick. Sums it all up for me. Suffice to say, if Cupid were a real bloke there is no doubt in my mind that he would return back to his single seater cloud alone. Prepubescent jelly rolls are not particularly attractive. And it’s not even as if he’s very well hung. Cupid’s erection wouldn’t make a half decent toothpick. If that sort of thing were popular, I would get laid every night.
I wandered over to the middle aged spread laid out buffet style on trestle tables and helped myself to a scotch egg like an orange bollock. The man standing next to me was eating the complementary cockles straight out of the jar with a long pin. As I bit deeply through the breaded delicacy I watched a group of men at the other end of the bar clustered around a television and was about to wander over and see what the attraction was when it all happened at once. The DJ, dapper in Hawaii 5-0 style blazer and haircut gave me a little wink, bleached teeth glistening in the half light and began to play ‘The Wind Beneath My Wings’. Clearly an emotional moment. Some of the men seated at the little tables began to quietly weep and incoherently pound the table tops. One mans fists were clenched so tight that he had drawn blood from his palms. He showed me his wounds like a pathetically sexually frustrated messiah as I bit into a jumbo pickled onion and felt the vinegar run down my beard.
In Japan, you can pay to eat sushi off a naked girl. This is highly cultural and erotic, provided that the sushi is fresh, and you are not a member of the KGB. I wonder what the British equivalent would be. Strips of beef jerky off a member of the Women’s Institute. Dirty old cows. I’ve seen their tits in a film.
Rejection is never easy, and it helps to have something to do with your hands in the sensitive moments following. Once on a date, I managed to spell out the word ‘odium’ in the thorny long stems of snubbed red roses. I didn’t even realise I had done it.
Ordering more gin was made difficult by the intensity of the power-ballads now echoing around the room. As I turned, I noticed that one of the whimpering men had finally got it together, and committed ritual suicide with a disposable plastic knife artfully spelling out the word ‘lonely’ with his death throes using his still warm entrails. The room took on a pungent aroma of penetrated bowel as I took my gin and wandered over to the cluster of men by the television. They nodded at me sadly as I arrived. I realised they were comparing scar tissue while one of their number showed highlights of a video of his recent open heart surgery. One of them offered me an enema, and I decided it was time to go home. Alone.
If I could, I would re-brand Valentine’s Day for single, unattractive but sexually precocious people; Cupid, replaced by a symbolic grinning Keith Chegwin would become a length more obviously masculine - about 14” more, thick and veined like a power-lifters neck, and the streets would fill with all the ugly people of the world, bent on getting laid in steaming, many storied orgies with Cheggers on top. Poke the freak.
It would be like taking a lump hammer to an ancient Greek erotic vase, and we could cathartically vent our sexual frustration like Steve Coogan on blue pills. Beauty is just a bland average: Valentine’s Day, the festival of flesh. All flesh is erotic flesh and I want to see it squirt and quiver in blind, ergonomic writhing masses looking like gigantic aesthetic tumours visible from space, every orifice filled with thrusting love. Cupid has hung up his bow and arrow and replaced it with a Polaris missile capable of taking out a city the size of Bristol. There would be no fallout, apart from a slightly awkward morning after, and it would be the flowering of a new renaissance. Botticelli spins so hard his coffin cuts a furrow straight to hell.
The door of my flat shut with a hollow bang and I turned on the TV. Orange monkeys from Essex pull kissy faces and advertise premium rate chat. Hardcore chin sucking they say, quivering Blitzkrieg orgasm, felching chicken lips and moaning performance art wank £1.50 a minute. What’s the world cumming to?
I lie in bed and listen to the people next door have sex. The walls are thin and I can tell exactly what position they are in. As they enter their usual doggy style finale I bang on the wall, shouting ‘do you think you could give it a bit more volume, I’m about to come’. The noise abruptly halts and I watch the orange monkeys in silence, trying to guess which parts of them are plastic and in the meantime pull one off myself.
Unusually, there is a patch of blood in the cold bubble of spunk in the shape of a heart. The joyless, racking orgasm sends me into what I can only describe as tantric spasm, and I am unlikely to recover any time soon; it is some time before I realise that my pillow is damp.
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"If you wanted to put Paul Knight's novel 'A Trail of Burnt Paper' into a shareholder pleasing box you might compare it to Japanese horror film 'The Ring'... The writing can be brutal at times, at other times it is controlled and delicate. It hasn't been edited into a neater style or more conventional structure but that is part of its beauty"- ARENA Magazine.