Spare me the schlock horror of Valentine's Day

So there'll be no flowers and cards chez Curtis this Valentine's Day - or "Tuesday night" as I prefer to call it - no romantic dinner out.

At our age, champagne only stimulates heartburn. And if my wife asked me to sprint up the stairs and ravish her, I'm not sure I'd be able to manage both. Not that I have anything against the commercial schmaltz-fest of February 14, you understand. If you can only express love on a day designated by the evil axis of the greetings card/fluffy toy industries, named after a beheaded Roman martyr, then hey, be my guest.

No, my abandonment of the annual VD celebration is based on bitter experience, rather than principle. I should have been primed to resist it, given that the only valentine cards I ever received in the first three decades of my life were from my mum and from a pitying housemate at university. But Valentine's Day was always a great excuse for a display of affection, although it had to be dressed up as something ironic or clever. Garage flowers or the equivalent of the new 7p card from Asda simply wouldn't cut it, but nor would the clichéd romantic tête-à-tête. One had to mock the event while expending vast amounts of cash and effort in the hope of reaping the romantic benefits.

Oh, the pressure to be creative and original. Years ago, I took my wife to Amsterdam to celebrate Valentine's Day on a floating hotel. Romantic, no? Well, no. It was called the Boatel, and turned out to be a converted car ferry, moored in a dock near the station. It reeked of stale marijuana and was full of rutting, beer-sodden twentysomethings from Yorkshire.

I was never allowed to arrange a holiday again.
Or there was the time we booked ourselves into a black-tie, three-course dinner at a kitschy but excellent local French restaurant. The owner met us at the door, waxed moustache twitching in consternation, to say he wasn't ready, with the result that 20-odd couples, the men all dressed like penguins, spent a fretful hour in a local Irish pub, watched over balefully by the tattooed youth of Elephant and Castle. Not quite as upsetting as the Valentine's Day when I awoke early, made breakfast, then strewed rose petals collected from the garden over my wife's sleeping form. She woke up screaming in abject terror and had to be scraped off the ceiling.

I gradually realised that we'd never opened all the romantically titled first edition books we'd bought for each other, lost the mix tapes we'd burned onto CD, thrown out the cards we'd lovingly hand-crafted.

A friend who wrote his wife a poem every Valentine's Day confessed that, three decades in, he was reduced to limericks. But the romance of Valentine's Day finally died for me when we went, one February 14, for a cocktail at our favourite restaurant before going to see Shadow of the Vampire (I know...). Our friend the chef surveyed the roomful of billing, cooing couples.

"Bastards!" he muttered. "It's the only night of the year this lot eat out. No repeat business. So I've put the prices up 15 per cent."