Roses and near-misses; Valentine and SAD!

Did you know that more home pregnancy kits are sold in March every year than any other month? That’s just a few weeks after more than 50 million roses are sold worldwide on just one day in February.

Phew, I’ve been frittering away my gray matter all night chasing a connection between the two occurrences. The plot thickened when half dozen roses arrived in my office within the space of about three hours yesterday. I smelled an all-embracing conspiracy.

But I didn’t want to dump the flowers so I took them home, still fretting over red roses and pregnancy kits. Michelle beamed; gone was the vanilla smile of seeing the same man for 20 years. Happy Valentine, she radiated. Billions of bilious blue blistering barnacles… it’s Valentine!

It’s a good time to ask if we ever stop to tell our loved ones how much they mean to us. Valentine’s Day isn’t for just amorous lovers but a day to show our appreciation to all who deserves it.

I just found out that 73% of people who buy flowers on Valentine are men while only 27% are women. Over one billion valentine cards are sent, in order of preference, to teachers, children, mothers, wives, sweethearts and pets. If you don’t like Valentine, it’s just a thing called sour grapes, especially if you are married and Valentine is actually an old, ugly thing in the house.

You are excused, of course, if you are single with no romantic ties. Cheer up my friend, there’s a special day just for you and guess what, it is on 14 February! The Singles Awareness Day, otherwise referred to as SAD is yours. Conceived as an alternative to Valentine’s Day, SAD is for single people to celebrate or commiserate in their status as ‘single’. So how do you wish a ‘single’ on this special day? Happy SAD, what else?

Dulith Herath, the inspirational wizard of Kapruka, Sri Lanka’s largest online store called with the news that his web domain was flooded with a record-breaking number of purchases of flowers, delivered promptly on Valentine’s Day.

Turned out that I wasn’t the only one who was in for a narrow shave. Hey, I know you did, too! But I’m talking about a megaton asteroid half the size of a football field which shaved past planet earth. The asteroid known as 2012 DA14 missed Valentine’s Day and was slated to whiz pass us as it hurtled through earth’s ring of communications and weather satellites.

According to eminent sky watchers, we have never seen an object this big gets this close to earth but it may not come as good news for millions of husbands tottering in the wake of yet another Valentine debacle hoping that the asteroid would actually hit their wives… err earth.

A friend called last night with news of yet another narrow shave. “I was at my secretary’s house last afternoon celebrating Valentine; exhausted we both fell asleep. It was 6 o’clock when I woke up and while getting dressed I asked her to take my shoes outside and rub the soles on a patch of grass,” he blabbered on.

My wife was fuming by the time I got home. I confessed and told her that I was having an affair with my secretary and that’s why I got late. She barked at me accusing me of being a blatant liar, asking me how I could go play golf on Valentine’s Day!

I think I’ll take to golf.

(Dinesh Watawana is a former foreign correspondent and military analyst. He is a brand consultant and heads The 7th Frontier, an integrated communications agency which masterminded the globally-acclaimed eco tourism hotspot KumbukRiver. Email him at [email protected].)