Suzanne Harrington: If cute puns make you want to dry heave, you've just hit Peak Valentine

"People get their lover's faces screened onto a cartoon 99, and the instruction to "Lick Me Til Ice Cream"."

Suzanne Harrington. Pic: Andrew Hasson

When the suggestion to “give the gift of easy battery gardening this Valentine’s Day” pops up in my inbox, I am immediately suffused in an anxiety that the world is moving on without me, that the Millennials have invented another new sex thing about which I know nothing. 

I’m still reading up on polyamory and sologamy — WTF is easy battery gardening? Is it complicated? Does it involve depilation, or stimulation, or both? Are there intimidating devices? Sex robots? Will it hurt? Is it even legal?

None of the above. It’s a press release for battery-powered leaf blowers. 

Actual leaf blowers, to blow your fallen leaves, not your mind or anything else, following the brainwave of someone in PR who thought it would be smart marketing to harness Valentine’s Day as a way of selling garden equipment. 

Because nothing says romance like the battery-powered blowing of your rotting vegetation. 

I sigh, both in relief that I don’t have to learn any new tricks, and also in existential despair that we now live in a world where we attempt to sell each other battery-powered leaf blowers to signify romantic love.

We shouldn’t be that surprised really — Valentine’s Day, once the preserve of mass-produced chocolate with low cocoa content and cellophane-wrapped carnations from the petrol station, now forms a central pillar of the romance-industrial complex where literally everyone — not just florists and restauranteurs — gets onboard, from Anne Summers to hot-air balloonists, hotel packages, to cheap jewellers and perfumiers. 

Even the manufacturers of beef jerky bouquets and battery-powered leaf blowers thought they’d have a go.

What used to be a pop-up aisle at the card shop full of reds and pinks and soppy teddies — the bears, not the garments — is now all about personally curating the unique gift.

See also the weaponisation of cute, where instead of soppy bears, cute now means mugs emblazoned with cartoon cheeses saying ‘I Camembert To Brie Without You’, or black and yellow socks with a couple’s names on them because they’re ‘Meant To Bee’, or they’re ‘Sole Mates’.

You can get photos of your lover’s head printed on an outsized hoodie, have their names engraved on personalised pepper grinders —again, not a euphemism, but an actual condiment dispenser — and T-shirts, with their faces screened onto a cartoon 99 and the instruction to ‘Lick Me Til Ice Cream’.

If by now you’re screaming for different reasons, perhaps even dry heaving onto your feet, it’s OK, it just means you’re Gen X or older. 

You’re having an OK Boomer moment, even if you’re biologically far too young to be a Boomer. Or you’re identifying as Middle Aged Bloke —the one who annually shouts that Valentine’s is a load of old bollocks — even if you were assigned female at birth.

You’ve just reached Peak Valentine. To alleviate this Peak Valentine nausea, you could always, for $15 (€14) at the Bronx Zoo, have a Madagascan hissing cockroach named after your lover.

Because, unlike leaf blowers, cockroaches are forever. Eternal and indestructible.