Valentine's Day: Leave it or Love it?

So, Christmas is over. January is done. We’ve settled into a new year and after the festive mayhem we can, in February, finally relax. Right? Wrong. On February 14th Valentine will once again rear his saintly head and millions of people will go out and buy cards and maybe flowers and chocolates. Some may even splurge a load of cash on fancy restaurants. Men may flash their credit cards and buy expensive jewellery and maybe even diamond rings. Flower petals will be sprinkled in baths, a chorus of champagne corks will be heard popping across the nation, girls and boys will count their anonymous cards dropped lovingly into letterboxes all over the world and bedsprings will be put to the ultimate test.

I say this. I’m guessing at a lot of it as most of my friends won’t even admit to valuing the day at all. Ask anyone about Valentine’s Day and you’re met with stony-faced cynicism and well-rehearsed replies about how Valentine’s Day is nothing more than a money-making exercise designed to steal from the poor and give to the corporate rich. They’ll go on passionately about how you should show your love for someone everyday not just when Hallmark tells you to.

The non-believers are so vehement in their tirade against Valentine’s Day that I really believe they mean it. I’ve struggled to find anyone who’s willing to buy into it or who is, at least, willing to admit that they buy into it but some of them must be fibbing. There are 25 million people in the UK that send cards. Over half of the entire UK population spends approximately 1.3 billion British pounds in Valentine’s related way which means at least half of my friends are telling porkies. And, when you think about it, what actually is the problem with Valentine’s Day?

Ok, so I’ll admit it’s commercialized and it’s forced upon us and it gives people an opportunity to start ripping us off but isn’t that just like Christmas, and Easter and Halloween? I suspect that those who celebrate Valentine’s Day at the very least believe in love. When you compare this to those who celebrate Christmas, I’m not certain as many of them believe in God, a point perfectly illustrated when my two-year old nephew very sweetly said to the local vicar at the Christmas Eve carol service, “I know what Christmas is all about. It’s about the birth of Santa Claus.” Cue embarrassed shuffling from the family.

Does Valentine’s Day really deserve all this bullying? If you can, for one moment, ignore all those bellowing against it then think about this: I tell my fiancé I love him at least once a day but, in the midst of our hectic lives do I get the chance to make him feel special? Do I always have time to block out every other little mundane detail in our life and really make the time to sit down and exist completely in our own little love bubble? No, if I’m honest I don’t. Neither does he. And, neither does anyone else. Yes, we may have an opportunity to do it more than once a year, but if for some reason we don’t, then thank the lord for Valentine’s Day!

Look at it as a gift. It’s a day given to us to reassess. Just like Christmas day it provides us with an opportunity to stop and look at the person lying in bed next to them, or sitting opposite them at breakfast and remember all those feelings that existed between you before bills and mortgages and children and careers and everything else got in the way. Unlike Christmas day, it was excommunicated from the religious calendar back in 1969 so you don’t even have to feel any guilt or hypocrisy about sitting in a church (for the first time that year) celebrating it. You don’t need to spend a fortune on it; it doesn’t need to be grandiose and over-the-top because at the end of the day it’s about making time for each other and in this world that is something I get the chance to do less and less.

Its origins endear it to me even more. While it’s unclear exactly which early Christian martyr named Valentine (there were quite a few apparently) was being honoured with the celebration, it is clear that it was initially a religious festival. As with everything, the decline of religious belief means that hugely embroidered and often totally fabricated stories have emerged to underpin its non-religious existence. My favourite though is the tale that is most common in modern folklore.

Valentine was a priest in the days of Roman Emperor Claudius II. While everyone else was spilling blood in the coliseum, and building enormously successful roads and drainage systems, Valentine was working on a more benevolent and gentle cause: one in the name of love. Claudius II had decreed that all young men must remain single believing that a successful army and strong soldiers could not be made up of married men. While his logic is somewhat questionable, it was the law and that was that. But, behind the sexually frustrated scenes of the Roman army, Valentine was performing secret marriages allowing young men to marry their sweethearts. Now, I’d like to tell you that love won out and that Valentine showed Claudius II the error of his ways, but I’d be lying. As with most Roman stories, this one ends in jail and death but from his death sprung the beginnings of what we now know as Valentine’s Day – a celebration, all over the world, of the love that Valentine fought for. As to whether my tale is true…I don’t know. It could be a load of codswallop for all I know, but when has truth and logic ever mattered? Don’t even get me started on the Christmas story.

It would, of course, be impossible to discuss Valentine’s Day without discussing the impact it has on those without someone to share it with. In recent times, the day has developed it’s own alter ego and is known amongst those unattached as Singles Awareness Day. To my knowledge, those who are single deal with it in one of three ways. Either they gather all their friends together and have a good time regardless, or they sit in front of romantic movies and cry their socks off lamenting the lack of respective boy or girl or they ignore it altogether. To some extent it’s a case of greener grass. If there was a day celebrating singledom, you can bet your platinum wedding bands that attached people all over the world would secretly wish that they could be part of that, if only for the day.

At the end of the day, what harm does Valentine’s Day do? It’s not as if everyone dresses up as the undead and knocks on strangers’ doors begging for food only to mete out their own form of torturous punishment if, heaven forbid, they happen to have run out of sweets. It’s not also as if everyone ignores the lack of logic between chocolate bunnies and Jesus rising from the dead and eats themselves into a sugar-coloured stupor.

Valentine’s Day is simply about taking time to show someone that you love them. In some ways, that makes more sense to me than any other holiday. So, I’m standing up for Valentine’s Day and defending it in the face of cyncism and stoney-faced hostility. Plus, I’m a sucker for the underdog.

This article was first published in Sussex Local magazine www.sussexlocal.net

iLoveFilm.com

I love film. I'm not promoting a new way of approaching film rental, I'm simply stating a fact. I love film. One of my new freelance enterprises is through a company called FILMCLUB (www.filmclub.org) and if you have never heard of them then you must go and see what they are all about. Funded by the Department of Education, it works tirelessly to set up film clubs in schools across the nation. Why? Well, simply put (and I whole-heartedly agree with them) they believe that providing children with access to a wide range of films is one of the most mind-opening, knowledge-enhancing, tolerance-building things that we can do.

Somebody asked me that impossible-to-answer question today: what is your favourite film? Well, if you will imagine for a moment that I have about 10,000 children, it's a little like asking me which one is my favourite. First of all, it changes all the time. I'm a big fan of the Coen brothers but pushed to decide on just one? Fargo. No, The Big Lebowski. Wait, no, I meant, No Country for Old Men. You see? I can't answer that. And, if I left it at the Coen Brothers, I'd be lying. That's my "cool" answer. Don't get me wrong - I HEART the Coen Brothers but my less cool (and just as honest) answer would have to be Top Gun. I know that's not cool or hip or trendy or even slightly respectable but it's more to do with the associations that I attach to the film.

I remember watching Top Gun for the first time when I was about ten. I'd just been allowed to have a TV in my own room (ah, the luxury!) and it was on waaaaaay past my bed time. I had to turn the volume right down because I didn't want my parents to wake up, so I had to sit about three inches away from the screen trying to hear everything. I remember laughing at Goose's wicked one-liners, and 'fan-gurling' over Tom Cruise (that was before I knew any better) and thinking this was possibly, just about the best film I'd ever secretly seen. For the first sixty minutes, time stopped, the world ceased to turn and absolutely nothing else occurred beyond the four walls of my bedroom.

Then (excuse the spoiler) Goose died.

I think that was the first time in my life that I'd been emotionally torn apart by a film. From the moment the opening credits had rolled and Maverick had been told that if he didn't behave he'd, "be flying a plane full of rubber dog sh*t from Hong Kong" I had fallen in love with Goose. I think it was the first film I'd seen where they didn't all live. I had a Dorothy moment: I suddenly realised I wasn't in Disney anymore. I was heartbroken. I cried and cried and cried and then cried some more. I remember feeling real grief for about two days. It haunted me. Then my mum took me to see Philadelphia and I realised I wasn't going to last long in the cinematic cut-throat, heart-wrenching world unless I manned up a bit.

Since then favourite films have come and gone. In the early days, Labyrinth and The Princess Bride stood on a pedestal way to high for any other film to get near. Later, Teen Wolf and Major League took over and now? Well, that brings us back to where I started.

The point I wanted to make is the importance of films, all films in our lives. I was lucky enough to have a father who was passionate about films and who took me to the cinema and exposed me to films that I otherwise wouldn't have had the opportunity to see. I vividly remember him taking five minutes in the car park after watching a film at the movie theatre. He would write the title of the film in his diary and give it a certain amount of stars out of five depending on how good he thought it was. We would discuss what we liked and didn't like about it and then we would negotiate a star rating between us. What's even better is that I would bet both my legs that he's still got all those diaries. I'd love to go through them one day and see what we decided for various films. I'm pretty sure that my early choices (Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure or Mr. Nanny) didn't rate very highly on my Dad's scale. Now though, he steals all my DVDs and calls me after each one to dissect it.

And, at the heart of it, that's what FILMCLUB is all about. Even if kids don't have dads to take them to the cinema and get them talking about it afterwards and even if kids watch films they don't like, or that make them sad, FILMCLUB provides them with an opportunity to access those films. They can still go home and tell their parents all about it and that's a conversation that they otherwise wouldn't have with their parents. It's an opportunity for them to have opinions that aren't coloured by curriculums or exams or anything else. Films open their eyes to worlds, cultures and experiences that they may have only seen in their hazy dreams. Films make kids cry. But they also make them smile and laugh and stare in wonder at what the world has to offer us.

If you are a parent, or a teacher or an aunt or you simply know any kids...ask them if their school runs a FILMCLUB. If they don't direct them to the website www.filmclub.org or tell them to go to school and demand that their teachers go to the website. I promise you, they'll never look back.