Valentine’s Day Is Over

If, on February 14th, anyone mentions to you that they think St Valentine’s Day should be banned, that it’s a purely commercial exercise and those who succumb to its lure are morons in extremis, you don’t need to be a shrink to know that that person failed to receive a card in the morning mail. It’s guaranteed to give anyone the blues.

If someone, anyone, had had the foresight to send Capone a nice card and box of his favorite Havanas on the morning of 14th February 1929, then the whole ghastly misunderstanding later in the day at the Chicago warehouse on North Clark Street might have been avoided.

As a desperately shy teenager it was certainly the day I least looked forward to in the year. Whilst even the most unlikely of my schoolmates received at least a couple of cards inscribed in shaky anonymous handwriting, I was bereft of such comfort year upon year.

I never sent more than a single card, and for three consecutive years I sent it to the same girl, a girl who I doubt even knew of my existence. There were certain boys at my school who adopted a more wholesale approach, sending out up to fifty cards on the theory that they wouldn’t want anyone to be disappointed. They even got the juniors in school to write them, so that they retained that sense of anonymity, before scrawling their signature on the bottom of each. I would no more have signed my single card than I would have eaten my own hand. But each year those same boys received a postbag of lustful missives. I don’t think I envied them their success as much as I envied their confidence.

The anonymity thing is a double edged sword of course; if you receive an unsigned card, you can pretend that it’s from the person you really wanted to have sent you a card, and is not, as you secretly suspect, from that hideous and sweaty soul who keeps leering at you in a peculiar manner in the lunch queue. But also, an unsigned card means the frustration of knowing that someone out there might actually like you, and you have don’t have a clue as to whom that person might be.

By seventeen, I had fought my shyness to a degree, largely by hiding behind a guitar and letting other people sing my incipient songs while I stood as far behind the speakers as is allowable while still being considered a part of the band. But someone must have noticed. On the February 14th of my 18th year, I received a card. It was a verse of love poetry, and a message saying…  well actually, on reflection, it was more complimentary about my music than it was about me, but at the time it was the single most precious gift I had ever received. To this day I have no idea which of the few girls of my acquaintance sent that card, but, the truth is, I owe her. It made me feel a whole lot better about myself, and about my music. It gave me some kind of belief.

Of course, in retrospect, the angst and tears teenagers experience over those cards received or not received, however real at the time, seems so misplaced.  Anyone is capable of a grand gesture on one specific day of the year, it’s what happens between those people on the other 364 days that is the true test of love.

Jamie Field, February 2008