Best Valentine's ever
As I type this, my wife has been asleep for hours.
We didn’t go out to a restaurant. We ate what we would normally do. I opened a bottle of champagne, partly because I like champagne, partly to test Cleodhna’s unexpected-loud-noise phobia, and partly because, frankly, even if you hate the Hallmarkisation of the modern calendar, it feels churlish not to do something special on a day that is designed to unwittingly comfort people who are established in relationships.
So we watched The Vanishing (the original, not the remake) on DVD. If you haven’t seen the film, it’s a deeply chilling story of what happens when a man goes on holiday and loses his wife, and parenthetically the other relationships that suffer or are destroyed as a result. Perfect couple fodder. I strongly recommend it.
Oh, and we still wanted to watch stuff after that, so we stayed up some more and watched some episodes of The Human Body, in the hope that we’d get to the episode about people dying. As I said, we were in a frisky sort of mood.
Instead, we spent time with Cleodhna telling me about the time her younger sister managed to perfectly reproduce the Gary Larson sound-effect “wump” by fainting in a Glaswegian ear-piercing parlour, which meant we had to pause the DVD and now I don’t know what happened next.
Well, there’ll be time for that. As it happens, Cleodhna is now asleep, having got up hours earlier than me today, and having got up hours later, I’m still awake. After finishing this blog post, I plan to look at a few websites, maybe do some geek stuff, and then in turn go to bed.
I love my wife. I don’t need to be convinced by some tangential concurrence of events. Our relationship is not predicated on my paying money to Dutch, Belgian or US-based multinational companies. I do not need to have to justify my entire attitude towards my wife because, many years ago, a man who religious authorities would subsequently deem to have committed scientifically-impossible acts, was given posthumous ownership of one of the 365.25 days in the year, and today happened to be it.
Nonetheless. Cleodhna, I love you. And I had a great day today.