VD

God be with the days, as you might say, when Valentine's Day was all about your secret crush, and wondering whether somehow they might send you a totally anonymous card, even though they didn't know you existed or where you lived or really anything about you. And about dangerously fantasizing about the notion of sending a card to them, and how close you could go to letting them know who it was from without signing it in any way - because as far as we were concerned a Valentine wasn't a Valentine if it was signed with an actual name. They were supposed to be from secret admirers. (If you got one from your dad, that was just sad.) I remember one girl in our class did actually send her not-quite-boyfriend-yet an unsigned card when we were about 15, and I'm pretty sure we all got to admire the card before it was sent off. (Either that or we were shown her mystery card from him; one or the other but either way it sticks in my memory because that girl was never ever me.)

And God also be with the days when V-day was about shaving your legs really carefully and sourcing a lacy little black number and trying to get a table for 8pm in a nice restaurant, when all the restaurants in Dublin had grown wise to the 8pm-ers and realised that they could herd the idiot masses in for two sittings at 7 and 10 and get twice as many covers for their buck. I always hated going out for dinner on Valentine's Day anyway - or the associated Saturday - to be surrounded by other couples all dutifully doing their duty as couples and having dinner out and trying their damndest to think of meaningful nothings to say to their sweetheart without just resorting to making observations on all the other couples in the room.

Yesterday's celebrated day was marked mostly by me trying to get Monkey to sign his name seventeen times in the previous days: once for each member of his class, each of whom was required to be brought a card. This probably sounds totally normal to my USA-ian readers, and bizarre to my Irish readers. How it sounds to my reader in Moldova I have no idea, but I'd love to know, if you'd care to comment. (Please? Oh please?) The cards didn't have to be fancy, or even homemade, so I embraced the first part of that sentence and wrote the recipient's name at the top of 17 pieces of card, let Monkey stick stickers or draw elaborate curves denoting electricity (he said) on them, and just asked him to sign his name at the bottom.

(Okay, I admit I helped out a little more by writing "Happy Valentine's Day" in purple sparkly biro in the middle, and may have put a couple of pink sparkly hearts on some of the girls' ones, but mostly I decided that when you have a 4-year-old boy, it's okay to let the cards look like a 4-year-old boy (who has not, as yet, shown any inclination to follow in his architect/watercolourist grandfather's footprints, more's the pity) made them.)

The thing is, I see his teachers' point. Not only does this avoid any of the "she likes him more than me" traumas, because everyone gets a card from everyone, but Monkey's signature improved drastically from the first card - where his wobbly letters, went around the corner and I had to append a translation in parentheses below just in case - to the last several, where the letters were the perfect size to fit across the bottom and were all more or less the right shape. (His lowercase e's are a little more spiral-like than they should be, but that just makes them cute: they're the right way round, but he starts at the loose end instead of in the middle.)

So that was my Valentine's Day this year. Oh, and someone apparently hid a bottle of Rosemont Shiraz behind the fire extinguisher on the kitchen counter. No idea how that happened.