Fez Club is not hosting a masquerade ball and there aren’t fish-tanks there.  I long to gaze through a fish-tank.  Though there probably are friars in Cambridge (friars? maybe Oxford?), they are unlikely to have wedded students in secret after Michaelhouse Café closing hours.  Yet, I’ve never truly wanted my life to be a Renaissance tragedy, one of the few worlds in which undying love is both undying and almost always finally dead.

I view Valentine’s Day with cold indifference.  Actually, despite being an annual crutch for the student press and the aesthetic apex of confectionary shops, the 14th of February means very little.  Nobody knows exactly where the idea of Valentine’s Day originated, which is highly suspicious; it’s not the revolutionary celebration of Bastille Day, nor the patriotic whimper of St George’s, and certainly nothing quite so ritualistic as Christmas or as half-hearted as Easter.  While nobody’s such a cynic that they would complain about a romantic meal – and what a quaint excuse – for the rest of us, life continues – Wikipedia’s still live, the snow melts, and the bike’s ride.

Today, I tried to buy a copy of Romeo + Juliet, but it was £7.  For this, I blame St Valentine, whose endless association with a 1996 film (…or that 1595 play) will be forever inflating prices, just as he does with chocolates and cards and miscellaneous romantic items.  I’m still indifferent about Valentine’s Day, though not about love, which is wonderful; much more so than cherubs and arrows.  Plenty of people, wiser and more eloquent than I, have considered love to be the essence of the human condition.  I quietly agree.  Shakespeare thought it was too, probably.

Poor singletons, what a world we live in.  Love, love, love.  Failing love, mailing love, meeting love, eating love (M&S), selling love, smelling love, the success and the shame and the science of love.  Yes, that last one’s popular, recently, because it’s all biological now, romance, something to do with pheromones and brain-cells, not with eyes or hand-holding or questionable drunk dancing (tragically!).  Tragically, indeed, love is all around us.  How must Elizabeth have felt, unmatched, as the sixteenth century came to a close?

Shakespeare, of course, and not the first, saw this obsession with the vast undefined concept of romance before we invented florists and Valentine’s cards, and credit cards.  No doubt it will go on until space dust or nuclear fallout.  Nobody pays too much attention to this economic over-indulgence.  They even had a laugh at Romeo for being childishly attentive to the written conventions of love; Juliet chides him, ‘you kiss by th’book’.  Like Romeo’s favourite stock Petrarchan poetry, Valentine’s Day is plastic and slightly pathetic.  Let them send chocolates and eat spaghetti – the rest of us are fine! Yes, it’s no masquerade ball, but double vodka and coke for £3 is real.  No rounded hearts and contrived couplets.  Shakespeare would approve; I kiss by th’bottle.