My Somewhat Horrendous Valentine's Day

Fear not, Agent X, you don’t have to be married to be underwhelmed on Valentine’s.

Although in fairness to PVC, he wasn’t really to blame for the general horrendousness.

Now, I hate Valentine’s Day for the same reason I hate New Year’s Eve – because anything that hyped up is bound to be a disappointment. (There are other reasons why I hate VD, mostly to do with my utter disgust and contempt at capitalism’s attempt to sell ‘love’… or maybe I’m just bitter because no one ever paid for a singing telegram for me while I was in school and my disappointment at never getting the opportunity to hear ‘I’ll Make Love to You’ by Boys to Men screamed at me will now overshadow the rest of my romantic life…)

Anyway, I hate it. And flowers and all the crap make me cringe. A sentiment that PVC and I both share. Also any prospect of a hot date that evening was out of the question, as he had to be the demonstration partner for a beginners ceroc (a sort of jive-y ballroom dancing) class that night. The prospect of heckling him while he was up on the stage appealed to me, so I went along to the class.

Class was fun, and I got a good bit of heckling in. Afterwards there was some of social dancing, and then we had to decide whether we wanted to stay on for the intermediate class, or go home and eat cake. I was all for cake, but he insisted we stay, telling me that I was totally ready for intermediate (with my whole three lessons behind me). So we stayed.

Perhaps not surprisingly, I found the class kind of difficult. Which is a gentle way of saying I sucked. Oh how I sucked. (In fairness to me, I missed the beginning of the class because I had to go to the toilet, and my attention span was shot from the class that preceded it and another terrible day at work). But yeah, Lord of the Dance I was not. Even still, I couldn’t work out why PVC was acting really quite aggressive. He was being all “I said spin on THREE, not FOUR!” and I was all “dude chill out” until eventually he had to point out that his ex-girlfriend had joined the class with her new boyfriend and they had been dancing directly beside us for some time. Her new boyfriend was obviously at the same skill level as me, and she was doing a similar thing to PVC in that she was dragging the poor bugger all over the place.

I asked PVC if he wanted to go, but he was determined to stick the class out to the bitter end. So it then turned into this Strictly Ballroom-esk dance off, whereby we kept dancing into them and they kept dancing into us while the exes shot each other withering looks and I tried to check her out between demented spins. I thought it was funny, and I kept losing the plot and giggling, which only served to make PVC more annoyed at me.

An aside: PVC’s ex is freaking beautiful. You know that famous painting, with Venus emerging scantily clad from a clamshell? Well, like that. Long, flowing auburn hair, creamy skin, blue eyes, etc. I’ve seen photos of her, but she looks even better in real life. Although, by all accounts she’s a bit of a bitch, and while she’s got a nice rack, she has nothing on my ass. So, y’know. I wasn’t about to stick a diamante stiletto in her eye or anything, I was just kind of curious.

Finally admitting defeat, PVC and I sat down to watch the end of the class, while he gazed pensively in her direction. I asked him if he was going to say ‘hi’ which he decided he wasn’t, so we got up and skulked out before the final round of social dancing.

Now at this point, I’m expecting we’ll go to his place, eat cake and shag. But no, PVC has decided that the time was right for telling his parents that he’s planning to quit his ridiculously lucrative career in IT to become an impoverished photographer. This was not music to his highly-conservative parents’ ears. PVC proceeds to have a giant argument with his mum which lasts about two hours while I sit watching them awkwardly. I think a bit of blame might have ricoched in my direction, as the unwholesome artistic influence in his life, but I also might be paranoid. Anyway, not the most fun I’ve ever had, but in a perverse way kind of entertaining.

At the end of the night (into the early hours of Friday morning), we muster our last reserves of energy for cake consumption. Which unfortunately left zero energy for shagging. Bah.

Ah well. Shagged approximately five times this weekend, so I can’t really complain!