The Saccharine Avalanche


ROSES ARE RED

VIOLETS ARE BLUE

SUGAR IS SWEET

AND SO ARE YOU (OR MAYBE NOT)

In the 1960s Jim Reeves and others warbled their way through treacle with their top-selling versions of this little verse. At the same time, and with casual cruelty, schoolchildren were subverting the song in each other’s autograph books (remember those?) and cheerfully writing:

Roses are red

Violets are blue

A face like yours

Belongs in the zoo.

By the way, these sardonic little poets were probably the same diligent students who enjoyed rewriting Christmas carols.

Hark the herald angels sing

Beechams pills are just the thing

But this is no time for digressions….

The cards, the poems, the heart shaped pizzas……

Let’s focus on the red roses, the chocolates, the satin hearts, the inflated  prices and the short-lived annual frenzy of Valentine’s Day on February 14.

By now, of course, it’s the end of February so the roses have shrivelled, the leftovers have been sold off at half price and the satin hearts are stored away for next year. Everything has moved on. The Easter eggs are now appearing, to be followed rapidly by Mothers Day cards, Coronation memorabilia, Halloween masks, Black Friday consumerism, and hey presto, here we are back to the Christmas decorations in the loft.

So who WAS St. Valentine?

Before we leave St Valentine mouldering in the cupboard, it’s worth finding out a little more about him (or all three of them, as we will see), and consider the place of his romantic legacy in the context of #MeToo, violence against women and the rise of toxic masculinity.

The original Valentine may have been an African soldier, a Roman priest or an Umbrian bishop. The second of them may have been beheaded by the Emperor Claudius in or around 270 AD. The third was perhaps killed in a vague battle somewhere. Valentine’s relics, mainly bits of bone and the occasional skull, can be found in Birmingham, Prague, Malta, Dublin and various other places in between. And in addition to his association with romantic love, Valentine is also the patron saint of beekeeping, epilepsy and the plague.

Is there a dark underbelly lurking beneath it all?

The saccharine avalanche really began with the Victorians, but well before then St Valentine’s Day was mentioned by Chaucer in ‘The Parliament of Fowls’ as the date when birds begin to mate.  Shakespeare also has an interesting reference in ‘Hamlet’, when Ophelia, mad with grief, sings snatches of a song about betrayal.

‘….I a maid at your window

To be your Valentine.

Then up he rose and donned his clothes

And dupped the chamber door.

Let in the maid that out a maid

Never departed more.’

An early #MeToo moment perhaps?

Rather surprisingly too, the sentimental Victorians managed to find time to indulge in the nasty side to romantic love, sending cards with unpleasant pictures alongside rhymes like:

‘Tis a lemon that I hand you

And bid you now ‘skiddoo’

Because I love another

There is no chance for you.’

And there’s an American  florist who will happily deliver a bunch of dead, headless or rotting flowers to unfaithful lovers

‘They're not worthy of the flower? Send 'em this. . . Just STEMS!  $19.99’

What is really going on?

It’s interesting to think about what is going on inside these mid-February splurges of romantic sentimentality. Is it simply rampant and sexist commercialism? Or perhaps it’s a distorted sign of a collective yearning for spring, fertility and growth. There is a theory that the festival actually emerged from Lupercal, a wild Roman rave-up where half-naked young men roamed the streets using strips of skin from freshly slaughtered goats to beat young women, allegedly making them more fertile. Mmmm…..

In his book, ‘Examined Lives’, the psychiatrist Stephen Grosz describes a specific case where he focuses on the phrase ‘The bigger the front, the bigger the back’. This makes wider sense when we look at how extreme and grandiose presentations of self can mask behaviour that is the grotesque opposite. An obvious example would be Jimmy Savile whose carefully staged, high profile commitment to generous charitable work hid a life of loathsome corruption and depravity. We’ve seen pious clergymen revealed as child abusers and the the grasping hypocrisy of moralising, self-righteous politicians. The violent behaviour of apparently highly regarded police officers is being exposed on almost a daily basis.

At the moment the lifestyle of the so-called influencer Andrew Tate is now coming under intense scrutiny. Disturbingly he has been admired by many young men for his unpleasant ‘front’, his flaunting of money, his cars and his views of women. And now, as he is investigated, even more sordid and squalid possibilities about his ‘back’ are coming into focus.

Best to ignore the whole thing?

There is no indication that the excesses of Valentine’s Day are abating. For many of us it is nothing more than a slightly bizarre and baffling sideshow.

But, beware the lovers who profess rather too much undying affection at the same time as plying you with roses, teddy bears, heart shaped cakes and satin knickers. They may not be all that  they seem.

And quite honestly, in February,  it’s much nicer to have a bunch of early daffodils. Nicer too to think about Valentine as the patron saint of beekeepers.

As Confucius says:

 ‘Fine words and an insinuating appearance are seldom associated with true virtue’

 

 

 

 

 



 

Location: Milton Keynes, UK

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