A flashback…

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Most women, on Valentine’s Day, are quite happy to wake up and find a couple of hundred bucks on the bedside table. But not Brenda. Oh, no. She woke up and said she felt like decent breasts. “No problem,” I said, getting off the floor upon which I had inexplicably spent the night. “I’ll nip out and pick some up.”

By the time I left the pub, I had forgotten what she wanted so I sent her a Please Call Me. “Breasts,” she said. “Chicken or beef?” said I. She pointed out that cows did not have breasts. “On the udder hand, Darren,” I said.

Anyway. Turns out that I had cocked it up as usual. She wanted a completely new set of human breasts and not something smothered in honey and mustard sauce and nibbled on at lunch, although why we couldn’t combine the two was beyond me.

Most women, I imagine, choose the enhancement option in matters this close to the chest. Brenda wanted the opposite. Unheard of, where I come from. Come to think of it, where I come from most things are unheard of. Intellectual gigantism is one of the few conditions my so-called friends do not suffer from.

To men, the notion of a breast reduction makes about as much sense as gobbling handfuls of Chinese medicine guaranteed to make one’s willie smaller. Ever since we were born, we have been conditioned to believe that bigger is better – the exception being the willie department. Here, we are more than happy to cling to the unusually charitable Cosmo myth that size doesn’t count.

The first thing boy babies see when they open their eyes is a giant breast bearing down on them like some terrible Peruvian landslide. It has a tremendous impact on their outlook on life, especially if they are expected to swallow a nipple the size of a bricklayer’s thumb.

I tried telling Brenda that if she really wanted smaller breasts, there was a far less permanent way of getting them. She headed me off at the pass. “You will never have a threesome for as long as we are married.” I keep a very good divorce lawyer’s number on speed dial for moments like these, but he is due for release only in 2035. By then I expect I shall be more interested in philately than philandery.

And lo, it came to pass that I found myself helping Brenda into a backless gown in the gynae ward of a city hospital. Private, naturally. Go for a boob job at a state hospital and you risk walking out with a size 36C bum.

The week before, she had gone to see a couple of plastic sturgeons. Apparently it’s like getting your car panel-beaten. You need to get at least two quotes. She wasn’t that keen on the first doctor because he specialised in labiaplasty. Can’t blame her, really. Even I think there’s something a little odd about a man who sculpts designer vaginas for a living.

Nurses aren’t what they used to be. The guzzling of ethyl alcohol, the hideous screaming, the broken bottles, the stabbings. Perhaps they weren’t nurses at all. Come to think of it, they weren’t wearing uniforms. Neither did they have teeth. And they were on the pavement outside the hospital.

So I got Brenda into her ridiculous medical frock, all the while trying to talk her out of it. “Listen to me,” I said. “It’s not too late to run.” It’s not as if Brenda had enormous bazookas lashed to her front. Sure, they were more than a handful, but then so is she. Her breasts were fine. It’s her brain that could do with a nip and a tuck.

A nurse walked in and started filling in Brenda’s chart. Judging by her questions, I thought she might have been one of the ladies I saw in the street. “Where are the pain?” she asked. Brenda explained that she was about to have a breast reduction. “Dids you call a doctor?” I began giggling like a schoolgirl but saved my face by feigning stomach cramps. “Please may I have some pethidine?” I begged. Unfortunately, the nurse had absorbed just enough training to know not to hand out awesome drugs to people who were sitting in the visitor’s chair, even if they were clearly suffering from some sort of paroxysm.

Then the anaesthetist burst in, full of piss and propofol. He offered me a cursory handshake and proceeded to focus all his attention on Brenda. How very dare you, I thought. Why don’t you ask how I’m feeling? Maybe take my blood pressure? For all you know, I’m about to have a stroke. Brenda said later that he seemed nice. Yeah, right. To the bedside manner born.

I swallowed Brenda’s pre-med when she wasn’t looking and slipped out before Dr McDreamy swaggered in, flashing his scalpel and telling my wife to get her babylons out.

Here’s something I wrote at a time when my so-called marriage was at its best.

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Brenda said she wants me to take her out on Valentine’s Day. This puts me in a bit of a dilemma. Should I pay someone to do it or should I do it myself? Purists might say it would be more romantic to take care of something like this personally. But then what do I use? Poison would take too long. A gun is too vulgar. Perhaps a tastefully arranged accident might be best.

Living an increasingly isolated life, I have taken to musing aloud. I find it helps lull my existential crises into a false sense of reality while entertaining the dogs at the same time. Although giving voice to my thoughts goes some way towards reassuring me that I am still of this world, it does land me in a spot of bother now and again.

“Accident?” said Brenda. “What on earth are you on about?” I pretended to have suffered a stroke and began slurring about the clouds in the trees and the birds in my pocket. She was meant to pick up on the aphasia and rush me to the nearest couch, upon which I would weakly request that she bring me beer and change the channel. Instead, she accused me of being drunk and went off to make a cup of gin for herself.

God know what would happen if I ever had to have a genuine stroke. I’d probably crawl into the kitchen and lie there for days, soiling my broeks and burbling to myself while she stepped over me, reprimanding me for not closing the fridge door.

Anyway. It soon became clear that Brenda was not asking me to Kebble her. She wanted me to take her out in a far less permanent manner. To dinner, for instance. Given restaurant prices these days, it would have been cheaper to have her whacked. I watched her face to see if I had said that aloud but there was no reaction. Then again, she doesn’t react to a lot of what I say.

Valentine’s Day? Really? In a country where a woman can cut open a pregnant mother’s stomach, killing her and stealing her unborn child, and yet we’re more shocked by an increase in the petrol price? Yeah, baby! Bring on the roses and shower me with champagne.

One does not, however, wish to be the curmudgeonly grinch who pours acid rain on the happy parade. There will be festivities today and this is how it should be. It has been this way ever since a clasp of Christians called Valentine were martyred on or about the date in question. Fourteen of them, at last count. Back then, the name Valentine must have been the equivalent of John.

“This is our seventeenth bloody kid. What the hell are we going to call this one?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care. You keep making me pregnant, you name him.”

“Right. Valentine he is, then. I’m off to the tavern.”

Saint Valentine’s Day was first established by Pope Gelasius I in 496 AD. This dude rocked. For a start, he was of African origin. He probably wanted an entire month set aside for candle-lit dinners and unbridled fornicating. On the other hand, he did suppress the festival of Lupercalia, which makes me think he wasn’t as African as he made out to be. Lupercalia was celebrated by degenerate young nobles who would run through Rome naked, striking those they met with shaggy thongs. Girls would line up to be lashed to ensure fertility.

Pope Gelasius was an idiot. He should have stuck with it. I would far rather stay home and be whipped with a shaggy thong than trundle off to a pretentious restaurant, make small talk with a woman I don’t care for, pay a fortune for a meal I never wanted, then get arrested for drunk driving on the way home and sodomised by a fighting general in the 28s. But that’s just me.

Then, in 1969, a grumpy old man by the name of Pope Paul VI deleted St Valentine’s Day from the Roman calendar of saints. With the stroke of his pen, he kicked Cupid in the kidneys and opened the way for Hallmark to flood the world with their nausea-inducing cards.

Hallmark’s V-Day page says, “Valentine’s Day is for saying I Love Us.” What they hell are they trying to pull here? The message was always, “I love you.” What is this “us” business? Why are they screwing with the message? What are they saying? I love us, but I sure don’t love them? Who are them? Maybe them be those who don’t buy Hallmark cards.

Love is no longer the all-embracing thing it once was and it’s fair to say the world changed forever when, on a sultry summer afternoon in a San Francisco bathhouse, a small green simian sweet-talked his way into having hot monkey sex with two men wearing little more than moustaches.

Happy Valentine’s Day. Use a condom.