Valentine’s Day is upon us. I’ve never liked it. As an ugly ginger kid with a beautiful – much older – half-Indian sister, it was torture. Helen was a glamorous air stewardess and never short of cards or flowers. While I sat in my room listening to David Bowie and staring at the Starsky & Hutch posters I’d saved up for, Helen would be getting whisked away in a Mercedes to Joanna’s or some other club in Glasgow. In the run-up to Valentine’s Day 1976, age 12 and desperate for a card, I asked 11-year-old George next door if he would be my boyfriend. He said no. I shrugged and we resumed our den-building with his wee sister Lorna.
Henri, 61, who must be suffering from some kind of arrested development, is looking for a good kisser
Two years ago was the first Valentine’s Day I’d been alone in more than 40 years. I called in to pay a gardener who looks after land surrounding a house I manage. Pierre’s a hunter and on the wall in the open plan living room kitchen was a locked but glass-fronted cabinet stacked with a dozen or so rifles and shotguns. A pair of woodcock lay oven-ready on a roasting tin. Everywhere you looked there were hunters’ knives, ranging from tiny, to large enough to dismember an elephant. Like Gaston in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, Pierre uses ‘antlers in all of his decorating’. But on the table there was an exquisite bunch of flowers, a card and a bottle of good champagne for his wife. The sight gave me such a pang I had to sit down for a minute. Jeremy died eight months before. We didn’t celebrate Valentine’s Day as such but, silver-tongued devil that he was, he always wrote me wonderfully nuanced romantic lines in a card or letter.
Back in Glasgow at Christmas, a friend’s daughter came to visit. She’s a stunner in her mid-thirties and single, perhaps because when she was a teenager she told everyone she was holding out for Leonardo DiCaprio. Well out of Leo’s age range now, she’s taking a chance with the dating app Bumble. ‘Catriona, you should get on it!’ I explained I had it already. I set it up last Easter but put it on snooze mode after a few days because it was just too awful. ‘Let me see,’ she said. I handed my phone over. She reactivated the app. Almost immediately she brought her hand up to her mouth and started laughing. ‘Oh my God, he looks like he’s out on parole. Tell us where the bodies are. So does he and he’s only got one tooth. He looks like a Lorne sausage. This is hellish, I see what you mean.’ Then she deactivated it.
Last month, my German friend Gina and her 80-year-old Swedish boyfriend came to see me. They rented a cottage down the hill. ‘Show me Bumble,’ she said. So I did – it’s becoming a bit of a party piece. After a while I said: ‘Oh, he looks nice.’ She agreed but I swiped the wrong way and, because I can’t afford the paying version, he was gone forever.
This time I left the app live. Not out of hope that I’d find love again but because winter is cold and rainy, entertainments are few and the biographies people write are funny. Men’s lists of ‘wants’ often include sensuality and open-mindedness which to me, in this context, is downright creepy. Meanwhile Henri, 61, who must be suffering from some kind of arrested development, is looking for a woman who’s a good kisser. Thomas, 60, bless him, wants to end religious hate. Does he think the rest of us are fomenting it?
I got chatting to Danish Jacob from down on the coast without realising his main interest was nutrition. Not another over-privileged solipsistic bore who refuses a second glass and sucks the fun out of every meal with their ever-changing dietary beliefs. But no, in the few messages we exchanged he never mentioned food or supplements, only that he liked cars and couldn’t work because he’d recently undergone shoulder replacement surgery. He got bitten by a dog and I didn’t hear from him again.
The other man I spoke to briefly was an American in Paris – Bernard. On his profile he said he was 69, a bit over the age limit I’d set. More worrying: in his photos he looked younger. He was from New York; a retired ‘professor of American literature and culture’ who moved to Paris post-Covid and was writing his second novel. Among his ‘causes’ he listed BLM and feminism. Virtue-signalling. We didn’t hit it off despite having similarly bookish and fitness interests. He wrote older than he was – in a dry academic style with little humour, irony or lightness of spirit. I didn’t like his lack of intellectual modesty and I suspect he didn’t enjoy my flippancy and lack of intellectual heft. I deleted the app.
How often we get it wrong. Is it a want of self-knowledge, unconscious bias, or just general emotional blindness? Years ago in my mid-forties, I was at a posh dinner in Edinburgh. Towards the end of the evening, the man across leaned over and said: ‘Catriona, having seen your beautiful daughter sing at a charity do last weekend, I can only imagine how lovely you must have been when you were young.’ His wife, who was sitting next to him, turned and said, ‘Oh do shut up, Alan.’
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