They had come for the rigmarole and pantomime of three courses of Thai cuisine to prove to themselves, each other, and the imaginary beady-eyed world, that they were still in love. Now that encounter stands, planted flag-like in my memory, as the apotheosis of Bad Valentine’s. Clutching my cellophane cornet of aggressively-priced single rose, I staggered away, muttering my apologies. After some agonisingly terse conversation, and observing the Paddington stare given me by his girlfriend, I realised I had not just intruded on a private conversation, I had interrupted them actually breaking up. I still remember his expression as he looked up at me: like a face you might see through the porthole window of a crashing plane. Buoyed by pleasant surprise and the cheap white wine I’d been chinning, once the meal was over, I tottered over to his table on my Valentine’s-normative high heels to say hello. A few tables over, I spotted a colleague of mine out with his date. One year, on February 14, on a night colder than Jacob Rees Mogg’s heart (it’d not be a complete fix, but holding Valentine’s Day in, say, May would help a bit, wouldn’t it?), I was in a central Nottingham restaurant with my visiting Valentine. Yes, I used to be one of those fools who bothered with it, as part of the mindset you have in your twenties where you think the world is looking at you, cares what you do and is giving you marks out of ten on your cultural normativity. If you want to pay over the odds for one of those pared-down ‘Presume You’ll Be Having Sex Later, Sir And Madam’ cringey subtext-laden menus which inevitably involve salmon somewhere and blush cava, in a dining room with a strained, funereal mood – because groups always make the atmosphere, like it or not – be my guest. It takes everything that could be romantic, and sucks it into a black hole vortex super-event of non-romance. Well, here is my piping hot take: it is the antimatter of romance. This is a long way round to saying that as a romance novelist, I’m sometimes asked for my opinions on Valentine’s Day, like I might know anything about it. Take this down! I have a sort of Pixar-looking fluffy cat and a lot of leftover chocolate from Christmas, so I guess I’m a fair way there? Totally up for the fuchsia muumuu, too. Though at certain points in my so-called career I’d have had to admit she had a point.Īnyway, romance novelist sounds like I eat Turkish Delight on a fainting couch and am surrounded by those dogs that look like mobile powder puffs, like Matt Lucas in Little Britain as Babs Cartland. That doesn’t really sound like a job you can have, does it? With hindsight, I am dismayed I didn’t tell the careers advisor at Rushcliffe Comprehensive that was my ambition, given she thought I was an absolute joker as it was for saying ‘writer’. After seven books about relationships in the women’s commercial fiction or romantic comedy genre – or if you want to be politically incorrect, chick lit – I guess I can boldly and fairly claim the label. Life takes some strange turns and I’m not sure there’s going to be many weirder for me (well, never say never) than realising here we are in 2021, and my professional title is more or less ‘romance novelist’.
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