My Blue Valentine......

For me, February is always the worst month of the year. I know many who think it is January. They believe the post-Christmas-dark-presentless month is the depth of winter and that February heralds the end of grim despair and the beginning of spring. They are optimists. And they are wrong. It's February. I try never to make a decision in February. For me, it is the month of dump, ditch and flee, an un-endingly dull-dank-relentlessly-depressing, gloomy month of long faces and short days. I've left good men and better jobs in February. I once sold my home and took my 2-year old to Mexico after one too many postcards from Koh Phangan interrupted my morning porridge....... but that's a whole other story. And this year is proving to be a bumper February with 2 funerals in 2 weeks, while the rain seeps up out of the pavements and drips down from the bare-spiked trees; the kind of damp, gray weather that blurs day into night and a good reminder why God invented long-haul travel...... And then, right in the middle, there's Valentine's Day.....

The joy of Valentine's is obviously dictated by the amount of lurve in your life on that particular day: at the beginning of a relationship it will be full of cute, funny, fluffy, handmade-never-let-this-fuzzy-feeling-end gifts and cards. Chocolates will be special, flowers big and champagne abundant. There will be ribbons and hearts and expensive dinners booked weeks in advance to fill restaurants offering 2-for-1 on every other day of the month. Or at least that's what you hope. I once hid delicious little chocolate hearts amongst the possessions of my loved one: behind his razor, in his underwear drawer, tucked in his wallet to be uncovered at work. Only to discover he didn't believe in what he referred to as a 'hallmark holiday' and gave me a supremely tacky card, bought hastily and without irony. I have however also enjoyed the gifts of love in the form of homemade-compilation CDs, heart shaped boxes of chocolates...... an instant way to secure my devotion...... a heart drawn in blood...... and yet still I was surprised at the outcome of that relationship........ monumental flowers and once a trip to Marrakech....... yes that was a good year.

Unfortunately, like the very chocolates and flowers themselves, this level of commercial love will be greedily consumed, wither and die........have you seen the utterly brilliant, if some what depressing, Blue Valentine? So to fend of the distress of this particular loveless February I shall turn the heating up to eleven, leave the postcards unread and wear my brand new, second-hand-Armani jacket ....... pinstripe, flared sleeve, Westwoodian style collar for only £30....... everyday. And on Monday I shall go to a screening of West is West, the sequel to the excellent East is East, with the screen writer himself, Ayub Khan-Din ..........I say with, I mean he'll be in the same room.

Top tip: Nurse Jackie is back, Saturday night on BBC2 and 30 Rock, Thursdays on Comedy Central....... add that to all those half-priced-post-February 14th-heart-shaped chocolates and who cares what month it is.