The loneliness of the long-distance Zimmer

Yesterday was the Worst. Valentine's. Day. Ever.

It started off pretty normally: get up, get dressed, make breakfast, clean teeth, check Facebook, discover that potential inamorata has reported you for 'cyber-stalking', whatever that is. The suggestion that merely for bombarding photos the object of my affections with suggestive comments places me in the same bracket of internet society as a seventy-year-old man who pretends to be a fourteen-year-old girl in youth chatlines, only leaving the flickering light of the monitor to fetch some vaseline and a rubber glove, really, REALLY, REALLY pisses me off. What would they do with Dante Alghieri, who, only speaking to Beatrice Portinari twice during his life, was entirely content to stalk her through the streets of Florence, and shoe-horn love poems to her into La Commedia Divina and De Monarchia on the flimsiest pretexts? Had Facebook existed, I'm sure they'd close down his account rather than run the risk of him offending Beatrice by posting 20,000 lines of impeccable terza rima about her tits on her profile page. So how come he gets talked about as the greatest high poetic writer of the Middle Ages, and I get FUCKING BLOCKED ON FACEBOOK???!!!?? Seems strangely unfair, doesn't it?

Anyway, back to the day. My advances having been rebuffed by the fairer sex, oh, around 100% of the time (there was a girl in New Jersey, but, to be fair, she had drunk forty ounces of malt liquor prior to meeting me, and, for some reason, my rogueish, Pierce Brosnan-like charm works much better over there), I found myself broken, loveless and alone for yet another Valentine's day. While y'all were partying down with various female friends/male friends/transseuxal prostitutes, I spent a romantic evening on my own watching Noel's Live HQ with half a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc. I suppose, some day I'll look back on this and laugh, but, to be frank, that day seems a pretty bloody long way off.

PS. Coming back from the Gym, in between two three-hour sessions of revision, I couldn't help noticing the lead story in the Daily Mail was 'Thirteen-year-old father is symptom of broken Britain'. Typical. Everyone's getting some action except for me.