Valentine’s Day

…If you’ll pardon the pun.

One of the things that’s come up in feedback recently is that (on Substack in particular) there’s too much talking about writing, and not enough writing. So, for today, of all days, the writer stands back and lets the characters do the talking.

In this case it’s Valentine Klimt (of Valentine Klimt and the Revolution of Love), and it’s got to be apposite, right? Somebody born on Valentine’s Day, saddled with the name Valentine by well-meaning if scatty parents, coming of age in the ’60s … she’d surely have something to say on the subject?

Well, she did. But, as they say: writing is re-writing, and that sometimes means cutting, and this particular bit got cut because it simply didn’t do enough to drive the story forward. But as they also say: nothing is wasted in writing.

There. That’s enough writer-talk. Hope you enjoy this deleted scene… oh, and Happy Valentine’s Day!

Being born on Valentine’s Day has saddled Valentine Klimt with a number of problems — not least of which is being called Valentine. But the situation is compounded by her parents’ insistence that she leave London to head off round Europe on the grand tour instead of sticking with her hard-won proper job: “You don’t want to be a cog in a machine, Liebling.”

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Cog in a machine, indeed. Heading to the bus stop, past the boarded-up bomb site with its peeling OXO adverts, I’m still miffed.

OK, I’m not wedded to the idea of quantity surveying for life — the squarest profession in the world, I know — but having graduated I had to do something. Something concrete, if you’ll pardon the pun. Something that would lead to a result, unlike the endless dilettantism of some people I could mention. Career. Not being somebody’s dolly-bird secretary. Success, on my own terms. It’s 1968, after all.

Turning onto Vauxhall Road, the street’s populated by the usual mix of Londoners: bowler-hatted city types in gabardine macs, fortysomething housewives with their colourful hair scarves and pinched expressions. A couple of sallow-faced mods — teenage Pete Townshend worshippers — stand smoking next to their Vespas, collars turned up against the wind and drizzle, looking like they’ve just had their three-monthly shave. For some reason I feel sympathy for all these fellow denizens of Clapham, the spotty fag-smokers included, and can’t help wondering what their Valentine’s Day consists of. Dad always says it’s my day, but it doesn’t belong to me, it belongs to the stupid greetings card industry, and everybody hates it.

I mean: people who aren’t in a relationship — like the mods, undoubtedly — hate it, because it reminds them they’re not in a relationship. People who are in a relationship hate it because they have to buy cards and flowers, and think up something better than last year if they’re not to look like they don’t care. Fortysomething housewives hate it because they feel obliged to have exhausting sex to mark the occasion, and bowler-hatted city gents hate it because they have to say poncy things like ‘I love you’ — then risk their angina to perform exhausting sex to mark the occasion — and I hate it because it’s sitting on my birthday.

The 39A arrives and we climb aboard, angina and all, to see what inconveniences London Transport has in store for us today, not that there’s much alternative.

“Where ya headed, Miss?”

The bus conductor’s Jamaican accent brightens the weather and I return his smile as I proffer sixpence for my fare.

“Somewhere warmer than this, please.”

He laughs like a drain. “Sorry. We’re only gaan as far as the Elephant.”

“I guess Stockwell will have to do, then.”

As he heads off, taking his sunshine with him, I hear a background rumble about bloody foreigners from one of the angina brigade, and can barely resist the urge to explain to this wheezing bigot that our bus conductor is a commonwealth citizen, and therefore more British than I am.

Sorry if that makes me sound rather direct, but I am Austrian, after all. And French. And English. I suppose that requires some explanation.

Dad’s Austrian — that’s simple. Except he’s the one responsible for us all being called Klimt, and that’s not simple at all. I could write a book before I got to Dad arriving in London in 1938 on the same boat as Dr Freud — a family friend, actually, and someone else who didn’t enjoy the jackboot-stomping atmosphere in Vienna much after the Anschluss.

And then there’s Mum. French is my mother tongue. Or at least, it’s my mother’s tongue, which has caused more miscommunication than un tonneau du cochons ever since she stepped off the boat train and bumped into Dad, which leads us to sooty, snooty Clapham. That’s the English part, and the only home I’ve ever known.

The bus ambles towards Stockwell in a cloud of blue diesel fumes, as if trying to delay its fate in the concrete snarl-up of the Elephant and Castle. I know how it feels. Since Valentine’s Day is a commercial perversion of some beardy old saint’s birthday, why not go full pagan and invent something people would actually enjoy? February 15th isn’t used for anything. Free Love Day, anyone? At least that would spare me from being the target of every besotted office-johnny in Soho.

That’s the second problem on today’s agenda.

PS: While I’m busy with all this writerly baloney, my significant other is typing up a storm in her office one floor above, and the sound gets me thinking - I’m not with the person I’m closest to. It’s time to press ‘send’, and spend the rest of St Val’s anniversary with my nearest and dearest. I hope you’re equally blessed.

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