Multicultural celebrations. The changed nature of Valentines. Some more things that annoy me.

As today is Valentine’s day, here is a link to an item about India, where people are being encouraged to hug a cow, a sacred animal to Hindus, instead of getting tied up in Western values and celebrations. 

 

Sometimes it seems that we supposedly civilised people seize every opportunity to celebrate something and so we post greetings about Eid and Diwali and Hanukah and the summer and winter solstices on social media as well as Christmas and New Year, not to mention Chinese New Year and congratulate ourselves on how international, interfaith, intercultural we are! And of course, Saint Patrick’s Day and Burns’ Night.

What I sometimes wonder about is quite when Valentines changed from anonymous greetings sent from admirers to someone they took a fancy to into a kind of obligatory greeting boyfriends, lovers, husbands are supposed to send along with flowers or a more expensive token of their love to the person who presumably already knows where they stand in that person’s affections. Bathsheba Everdene sent farmer William Boldwood a correctly anonymous valentine in Hardy’s novel Far from the Madding Crowd. As is usual in Hardy novels, that did not end well. Fate always comes and gets you in the end! At the other end of the scale a friend and former colleague of mine recalls overhearing two female students at the sixth form college where we worked. They were discussing boyfriends. One said to the other, “If he doesn’t get me something b****y good for Valentine’s Day, I’ll batter him!” 

So young and so materialistic and so lacking a sense of romance! 

So much for Valentine’s Day! 

Further to the annoyance I expressed yesterday about random acts of kindness stories, I am also increasingly annoyed to receive information about cats and dogs that need to be rescued from Cyprus or Rumania - each individual endearing creature just needs a donation of around £300. 

And then there’s advice on how to bring up children! 

Not to mention the AITA stories where, for example, someone tells how she expects her daughter to pay her for looking after the grandchild, or doing the ironing, or helping with the cleaning, and then asks for opinions on this. I am told, by the way, that AITA stands forAm I The A**h**e?

 

And further to the First Dog on the Moon cartoon I mentioned yesterday, here’s a cartoon on the same subject by Martin Rowson in the Guardian.

By the way, according to something I read this morning every day some 1,800 weather balloons are launched worldwide, 92 in the USA alone. They all carry equipment of some kind. Many just float off. Of the tens of thousands launched every year, only 20% of these instruments are ever recovered. Then there’s space trash, loads of it, according to Brad Tucker, an astrophysicist and an astronomer at the Australian National University, “It could be anything purposefully put up: balloons to high-altitude drones. Or rubbish trapped in currents, like plastic bags and party balloons.”

So that’s it for unidentified flying objects. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!