How To Handle Valentine’s Day

So, Valentine’s Day – a day more pointless than Mother’s Day and Father’s Day – is almost upon us. Like a plague sent down by Cupid himself, it will empower the sex drive of rabid lovers and damage the fragile minds of obsessive partners, bringing an entire nation down to a low level of brain function for a whole twenty four hours (or perhaps the entire week, given the commercial power it enforces).

It’s all rubbish, of course, but the couples love it, so the rest of us just have to sit back and suppress our gag reflex as shop displays are overrun with tacky crap and our Facebook feeds are filled with ‘Valentine’s selfies’ and endless declarations of ‘I don’t know where I’d be without him/her,’ and the list goes on and on.

If you want to wake up and try to go about your business on this sorry day, it is good practice to enter into your own Lala Land where Cupid actually kills people with his arrows, and the entire concept of Valentine’s Day never even existed. To keep this dream alive for an entire day, I recommend the following steps:

    1. Do not sign into Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, or any other widely used social media tool. Whatsapp can be used, as long as you only interact with single people.

    2. Don’t drink. Well, not too much anyway. Four or five times the recommended daily intake would be a good target to aim for.

    3. If you plan on staying in for the day it wouldn’t be a bad idea to watch an extremely gory film, or something with little to no romance in it whatsoever. Erotic films are acceptable, but only if the storyline is weak and animalistic.

    4. If you insist on getting out and about, perhaps for a meal or a drink, you should drown your sorrows in Wetherspoons. Wetherspoons is safe. For once you might think of the smelly old regulars as good company.

    5. Remember that it’s not your fault that you’re single. It’s everyone else’s.

Oh! and for God’s sake, do not under any circumstances set a foot inside Nando’s. It would be awfully cheeky of you to encroach on the space of those starry-eyed fools as they tuck into their overhyped butterfly chicken.