Your lover has exactly one week to buy you the wrong-sized bra.  

With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, the man in your life may well be weighing up the various gift options as I write. Will it be the dozen long-stemmed roses, with thorns the size of your thumb? Will it be the chrysanthemums in a decorative cone of cellophane from the all-night garage? The heart-shaped box of Tia Maria truffles? Or, as my dear husband decided last year, the red satin negligee and dressing-gown, both in a size 16? Size 16! At the time, as now, I was a size 12, so you can imagine that the rest of our February 14 celebrations were a fairly muted affair. By way of explanation, he said he had been in a rush and thought roomy was preferable to clingy. I told him it was very roomy outside and that perhaps he’d like to try it on for size. 

In my experience, men are troubled by lingerie. Sure, they’re up for all the ogling and fondling and disrobing bit, but they’re hopeless in the shopping department. At this time of year, the nation’s lingerie stores are thronging with lost men - men in suits fingering silk panties, men in jeans flirting with push-up bras, men in a terrible funk, desperately hoping that you won’t think they’re a pervert or (worse!) a transvestite. And, after all the effort, the dear souls come out clutching a tissue-wrapped slice of sumptuous lace in a size that will fit your skinny sister or your jumbo mother-in-law. My feeling is that - like Jolen Crème Bleach, pads with wings and chocolate éclairs - lingerie is really something that women should buy for themselves, preferably in private, preferably with someone else’s credit card.

Once decent lingerie has been stripped out of the equation, I’m afraid I find Valentine’s Day about as interesting as stubbing a toe. Sadly, though, we’re rather lumbered with it, simply because we have been celebrating the date for millennia. According to my great friend Google (an absolute authority on all manner of fascinating tosh), way back in the ancient mists of time, Roman Emperor Claudius II decreed that young men should be forbidden to marry because singletons made better soldiers (they spent less time loitering in lingerie shops, apparently). A romantic young priest named Valentine defied Claudius, secretly marrying young couples. Unsurprisingly, he was martyred for his troubles, and in 496 AD or thereabouts Saint Pope Gelasius set aside February 14 to honour him. 

So if you are wondering who is responsible for the fluffy dogs with “I Wuff You” embroidered on their bellies, who we can blame for the rash of love-struck helium balloons, the nauseating “Diddums-4-Sweetums” messages in the small ads, the red satin negligee in the wrong bloody size – well, don’t blame your lover. Pope Gelasius is your man. 

Published You Magazine, February 6 2005