Grumpy Old St Valentine's Day

Today, Sunday 14^th February, is St. Valentine’s Day.  Why is it – and this is a plea straight from the heart – that’s is so outrageously difficult to find a Valentine’s Day card that doesn’t imply the recipient is some sort of fluffy toy (rabbit, teddy, small, cute dog or whatever) with the mental ability of a broken cuckoo-clock or, conversely, some sex-crazed maniac who’s gagging for it?  I mean, even if your tastes do lie in that direction, it’s a card, right? It’s going to be on the mantelpiece.  Couldn’t it ever be just a little embarrassing  (“More tea, Vicar?”)  to have a house decked with invitations to carry on in a way that would raise the eyebrows of the court of Katherine the Great? It is possible to find a card that indicates love and affection, but you don’t half have to search hard.

The original St Valentine was a Roman martyr. Actually, there seem to have been a few Valentines (then, as now, it was thought dead cool to have more than one Valentine) but they all seem to have made the dodgy career move of getting on the wrong side of whichever Roman Emperor was handy.  And if there’s one thing that history teaches us, it’s that Roman Emperors didn’t have a sense of humour; not a bit.  Even the most liberal of them seemed to think that bringing someone on as a tasty snack for lions (the original Lion Bar?) or smothering the unfortunate object of ire with pitch, lighting a match, and then complaining that These Saints Don’t Burn Like They Used To merely opened proceedings. I can’t help thinking that the various Valentines had enough to put up with without lumbering the poor beggars with the responsibility for wads of terminal cuteness or a whole raft of Goings On.

The page proofs for A Hundred Thousand Dragons arrived this week.  Yo!  It’s exciting (OK, maybe I should get out more) to know that it’s getting closer and closer to publication.  D-Day is the 27^th May.  For some reason, all my books have been published on the last Thursday of the month.  I don’t know why, but I’m not complaining.

I do hope, though, that there’ll be copies out in time for CrimeFest on the 20^th-23^rd May.  If you don’t know CrimeFest, look it up on t’internet (as Peter Kay would say).  It’s at the very nice Marriot Hotel in Bristol and is a great way to meet people and authors (sometimes they’re the same thing) and talk books and writing for a long   weekend.

At this stage, proof reading is mainly trying to catch punctuation errors and howlers so they don’t wriggle through onto the printed page.  So far, so good, but imagine, say, you have a character called Frances.  Just think of the unintentional hilarity that would be caused by a missing comma in the line of dialogue, “Has the doctor seen her, Fanny?”  Actually, you’d probably be better, so low are most readers’ minds (my mind hits rock-bottom dead easily) to leave Fanny’s name out altogether.  And you do have to watch the order of words, too.  I’ve just been on a Finnish wildlife and fisheries website (D’you know, I really should get out more!) where it says the first people arrived in Finland about 9,000 years ago looking for “fur-bearing animals and fish”. Wow.  Furry fish?  Are they, like, Mink(y) Whales?  (Honestly, I not making this up; take a look on   www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~finwgw I don't see why I should be the only anorak in town. )

I think my favourite howler, though, was perpetrated by a hapless schoolboy in an English Literature exam who wrote, "Wordsworth often answered the call of nature."  So that's not daffodils, then - more like sweet peas!