Valentine's Day!

Some single people hate Valentine's Day. I don't.

They say they are made to feel like outcasts. Excluded from the festivities.

What festivities? Going to a restaurant with candles on the table and mushy music playing ( I wanna know what love is, I want you to show me. I wanna feel what love is, I know you can show me). Single people don't go to restaurants anytime never mind Valentine's Day , so it's not like we're missing out on anything. 

I used to wait tables at a restaurant and Valentine's Day was always an easy night. The place was booked up months in advance by cheap-skate Romeos determined to romance their chips-fond-of Juliets (it was a pretty down-market restaurant that specialised in deep fried cuisine, that made up for in quantity what it lacked in quality).

It was great. "Hello, a table for two? Why not sit over there where we normally have a table of ten obnoxious, cackling, quick to complain, office-working morons who think because they're out for a sit-down dinner, they are entitled to be treated like royalty?"

It was easy for the chef too. Because she knew every sad man-Jack and Lady-Jill of them was going to order off the special menu which had been hastily typed up on parchment-style paper with little roses printed at the corners, and the kind of purple prose that disguises the fact that this was much the same crappy fast-food we served up pretty much all the time.

"Luscious breasts of succulent truffle-fed chicken, drenched in its own oyster jus. With thick chips and steamy aparagus."

Aye. Another two of those please, chef.

There you are!

That was quick.

Here, you might as well take these ones out to table two while you're at it.

But they haven't even ordered yet. 

Aye, trust me. Just take it out. And go up to the store and get me a couple of bottles of cooking sherry. It's going to be a long, easy, predictable night.

And no-one complains. They just sit and goggle each other and order a lot of wine, and order one dessert to share. "You have that bit."

"No you have that bit."

"No, it's got too much cream on it. I'm watching my figure."

"I think you look gorgeous just the way you are."

"Really?"

"Yes. Yes. Will...will you marry me?"

Hmm? Have we got any Champagne in the fridge? Maybe I should go and check.

Suddenly there is an emergency in the kitchen. The dishwasher informs me that the sous chef has barfed all over some plates in the sink. As supervisor, it is my job to reprimand him, but that is difficult when he is swaying between unconciousness and drunken psychopathy with a big sharp knife in his hand.

I bring to bear all my crisis management training, and instruct the kitchen porter to cover the said plates with puff pastry crusts, drizzle strawberry sauce hearts on them, garnish them with a dollop of chocolate ice-cream and a sprig of mint, and send them out as complementary rhubarb tart, with a complimentary bottle of wine, one each for staff and customers alike.

This seems to work. An ambience of merriment soon infuses the restaurant, and there are tips a-plenty, which is not surprising, considering most of these feckless gombeen customers have willfully shelled out thirty quid for a hideously tastless, woefully inadequate bunch of garish red flowers with a polystyrene heart with "I Love You!" crudely painted on it, not half an hour before they came here and paid twice what they normally would for food cooked and served by a crowd of mysanthropes, at least twice as drunk and uncaring as they normally are.

Hooray for St. Valentine!

By the way, if you can even bring yourself to watch that video, it may be a lesson in not to be too literal.

The "World on my shoulders" line demonstrates a particular inability to grasp the concept of metaphor.

Unless it is ironic, of course, which before I go to bed tonight, I will kneel at the side of my bed and pray to Christ it is.

But I guess if you are going to go to the trouble of patching together a cheap video for a Foriegner song, you are bound to be a bit of a dick in the first place.

Goodnight, children.