In Thailand the silly season is never far away and things usually get even more daft around Valentine's Day, which happens to be tomorrow. However, the festival has taken bit of a hit in recent years courtesy of Covid. With kissing, canoodling, caressing, cuddling, snogging and hugging generally frowned upon by authorities the occasion has inevitably lost a lot of its romance.
Something that should be enough to put you off any planned romantic encounters tomorrow is a poignant poem entitled First Kiss by Scotland's worst-ever poet Walter McCorrisken. It evokes the true taste of love:
I kissed her shyly on the mouth
Tasted nectar from her lips
A taste between a chocolate flake
And my favourite French-fried chips
The poem rambles on, but after his tongue encounters the lady's tonsils and a "forgotten tattie crisp" he faces a classic romantic dilemma: Did I love her for herself, or the taste of barbecue?
Valentine's is a rather spurious festival anyway, but gives people the excuse to do silly things and is admittedly a brief respite from our daily diet of depressing news. Over the years we've had mass underwater weddings in Trang, tying the knot aboard elephants in Chiang Mai and people sharing vows while hanging upside down after a bungee jump.
Even the animals can't escape. A few years ago in Songkhla we were treated to a wedding of two orangutans. A very handsome couple they were too although they both could have done with a haircut. Not to be outdone in Chiang Mai they married off seven pairs of rabbits in a solemn ceremony followed by a feast of carrots and cucumbers.
Voices of experience
So what is this thing called love?
Everyone seems to have a different opinion, although cynics seem to prevail. Years ago American author Ambrose Bierce observed: "Love is a temporary insanity, curable by marriage," while Somerset Maugham noted that "love is what happens between a man and a woman who don't know one another".
HL Mencken put it another way with his assessment that love is "the triumph of imagination over intelligence".
Actress Zsa Zsa Gabor experienced nine marriages during which she adopted a most pragmatic viewpoint about love: "I have never hated a man enough to give him his diamonds back."
Snog slog
Some years past in Pattaya a marathon kissing contest was held in which a Thai couple heroically stuck at it for more than 46 hours to beat the world record.
Not all contestants lasted the pace however. One lady fainted after but one-half hour of snogging, quite probably the best thing that could have happened to her. I suspect some other contestants wished they'd fainted too. As the hours ticked away several looked decidedly groggy and there was plenty of dribbling, not the most romantic of sights.
Thanks, but no thanks
For some reason gentlemen have an uncanny knack of choosing the most inappropriate Valentine's gifts for their sweethearts, and on the internet women have been relating some of the worst presents received.
Some gifts are pretty worrying. They included a gift-wrapped rubbish bin, a garden gnome holding a football, and a bowling ball even though the couple did not bowl.
It seems some guys haven't quite mastered this romance thing. One gentleman's idea of a thoughtful present was a collection of used pots and pans picked up at a garage sale. Another gave his wife a set of hub caps.
One husband had the nerve to present his wife with some lovely roses, only to take them back an hour later as he had actually bought them for his mother. Another gave his girlfriend some dirty old shoes. Apparently his mother couldn't wear them anymore because they hurt her feet.
Possibly the most insensitive gift was for a lady who received much smaller underwear than her size along with a free pass to the local fitness centre. It was accompanied by a note which read: "Hope you can eventually squeeze into these." That sounds like a perfect way to end a romance.
Taking the bait
My favourite inappropriate gift involves a gentleman who attempted to make things right only to succeed in making matters worse.
He was a keen fisherman but could not get his wife interested in his hobby primarily because she had a phobia about wiggling maggots and other live bait. So in a brave bid to win her over, on Valentine's Day he thoughtfully presented her with a tastefully wrapped box containing artificial bait, including some cute rubber worms.
Upon opening the box his wife reportedly burst into tears. They were not tears of joy.
The lonely rose
In the 1990s I arrived in the Bangkok Post office on Valentine's Day to find a single red rose left on my desk. Admittedly it looked a bit worse for wear but at least it was a real rose. Somebody cared. I even put it in a jar of water so it wouldn't become a dead rose.
Later in the evening the cleaner came around, saw the rose and promptly apologised. She explained she'd picked the rose off the floor the night before and put it on my desk but had forgotten to throw it away. So much for office romance.
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