Be my Valentine.

Not all of you obviously. Because while I am totally up for a letterbox widening, ego boosting encounter with an incredulous but insanely jealous postman, it’d just be wrong. And mostly because you’re either blokes or surfing from the safety of a mental ward. Or possibly both.

Still I’m on holiday and that’s good. So are the kids which you could possibly label as a slight downside. And so are everyone else’s kids which is a definite goolie masher when you’re all cramming into the same ball pits, swimming pools, parks, A&E departments, etc.

A&E was almost a certainty when the kids demanded roller blading once I’d vetoed the ball pit on the non unreasonable grounds it represented a fire risk. And 300 baying children violently assaulting each other and being noisily sick is not my idea of a tenner well spent.

The choice of knee pads was a good one. Something for me to learn from the kids.

Anyway Carol and I have turned our noses up – quite rightly – at all that Valentine’s nonsense and just settled for a quiet card each. Congratulating ourselves on shunning the rampant commercialism of twelve roses for fifty quid, a short but expensive trip to the picture shop rampantly commercialised me out of£250 on pictures for each others Valentine’s present”

I fully expect these to rest peacefully in our old pictures home where huge expanses of what was previously money collect dust in a upstairs corner. And because I’m married to a klepto, there’s a pictorial history spanning twenty years of changing tastes. Starting with classy black ash framed Athena prints through an expensive original pencil drawing phase and spiralling out of any sort of control once the kids were born. Well the first kid anyway, poor old Random has only the mugshots from school, and the occasional digital recording of her falling face forward into her food.

It does make me hanker somewhat for my poster of Kim Wilde in her ˜Kids in America’ heyday. That poster brought me many hours of enjoyment during long nights in my student days. It’s a double shame that she’s turned into a bit of an old boiler, and that the poster remained in our dingy digs once it became apparent it was stuck to the wall. I’ll leave it at that should I? Right-O.

Two delivery vans waited until we’d left the house before gleefully depositing a why can’t you stay in all day�” note under the door. Randoms’ bike was one of them and now the only time the courier can deliver it is sometime in 2009. And then only to Cornwell or Mars.

I’ll admit to this being a bit of a guess on my part since they’ve clearly heard about customer service by issuing a number with the card. Sadly they’ve failed to understand what it means since there is no one to answer the phone. Somehow I remained calm while an automated attendant reminded me “your call is important to us as we’re creaming 50{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} off the cost of this 0845 number“.

Too early for a beer? No, thought not.

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