The worst thing about dating again – worse than the apps, worse than the capital outlay, worse even than the moment when she looks at you over the dinner table, tilts her head, and says, not unkindly, ‘Oh! Is this a date?’ – is having to go to flower shops again.
When you buy condoms you’re not expected to dictate a card explaining why you’ve bought them
There is a theory that the reason women like flowers is because men have no interest in them – and so they mean more than a meal you’re also eating, or a show you’re also watching – but that’s not true in my case. I rather like flowers. I’m not one of those men who are baffled by the florist’s opening gambit – ‘What would you like to include?’, which for most men means ‘Name some flowers’ (and feel very pleased with yourself if you get beyond roses). This is probably the result of having a mother who was a keen flower-arranger, and whose entire social life was based around flower club. (At her funeral, the church looked like Elton John’s dressing room: all her flower club pals had brought their A-game.) Indeed, I find I have Views on flowers – I have never felt myself channeling my mother so directly as when a florist seriously suggested including stargazer lilies in a cottage-garden themed bouquet and I had to give her one of mummy’s hard stares.
One of my most firmly-held Views is that the best flowers are ones that you have grown yourself – nothing can beat a bunch of sweet peas from your garden shoved into a jam jar. (I have one on my desk at the moment, fragrance filling my study, in a range of colours my mother would have thought bordering on vulgar.) But one always worries that women, like the God of the Old Testament, have no respect for the offerings of the fruit of the ground – a chap needs to make a sacrifice. And going to a flower shop is nothing if not a sacrifice.
The whole process of buying flowers could not be better designed to embarrass an Englishman in the early stages of dating. For a start, there are the florists themselves. In most shops, the shop assistants are appropriate: in computer shops, they’re computer geeks; in hardware shops, they’re middle-aged men who look as if they know how to bleed a radiator; in bakeries, they’re always fat, and you know that if you ask for a couple of lardy cakes to go, they’ll understand. But buying flowers is a romantic and intimate purchase, and these women – besides looking like your mum’s cronies from flower club – always look as if they gave up on all that sort of nonsense years ago.
I always assumed, when I was a young man, that the most embarrassing purchase a man could make was prophylactics – it was a constant theme in skits on the Two Ronnies or Not the Nine O’Clock News, and a major plot point in Porterhouse Blue. It isn’t. Flowers are far worse – they have the same signaling effect, announcing to strangers that you like someone and are planning to do something about it, but without the low-stakes entry points a pharmacy provides. You can always work your way up to French letters, by way of unembarrassing products like deodorant or aspirin or imodium, but there’s nothing in flower shops to act as a fig leaf, even if they have fig leaves. (Why would you be buying a fig leaf?) You have to plunge in and go straight for the bouquet.
And then – the card. This is the most jarring difference. When you buy condoms you’re not expected to dictate a card explaining why you’ve bought them. For flowers, it seems to be compulsory. Always dictated – for some reason, you’re not trusted to write it yourself. (Do they think they will be liable under the Malicious Communications Act if your message is indecent? How many people do intend to cause distress and anxiety by way of a floral arrangement?) You have to stand in the shop, composing a message that is both highly personal and oblique enough that it will make a serviceable Instagram story propped up against the blooms (which is a tricky enough balancing act anyway), to a woman who looks like your mother.
It could be worse, of course. Luckily, most modern women are not Victorian maidens – not the women I plan on dating anyway – who are going to reach for their dictionary of the language of flowers and decide you are insulting their virtue, their character or their family. So long as you avoid white lilies (funerals) and stargazer lilies (‘vulgar, vulgar, vulgar’) you’re probably all right. It would just be nice if you could buy them in vending machines in pub lavatories.
Comments