I write this on Valentine’s Day, having run into the King of Greece early this morning in the local bank asking a teller where he could buy a Valentine card for his queen. (He received a blank stare for his trouble.) After 47 years of marriage, it’s nice to know that even kings bring Valentine cards to their queens.
Personally, I’m not a big card man. Love letters, yes, Valentine cards a no-no, romantic emails only when dead drunk. The purpose of a love letter is obviously to seduce. If seduction has taken place already, then it means the seducer wants more of the good stuff. I know, I know, it sounds awfully cynical, but I’ve been around for much too long to fall for all the rest. They say that seduction, unlike a marriage proposal, can never occur between equals. This is why I’ve been having so much trouble with my long-time fiancée. She is the deputy editor of The Spectator and I’m a lowly regular contributor. The inherent imbalance explains why seduction is always exploitative in one way or another.
Mind you, for seduction to be possible, one person must want sex more than the other — or else have less to lose by it. Two sainted Spectator editors ago, there were all sorts of seductions taking place and nobody lost nuttin’, as they say, except for the publisher, who gained a child. The only one who didn’t get lucky was poor little me, but then I was playing outside 56 Doughty Street, our then headquarters.
Looking at the seduction scene can be quite comic. The methods employed and the tactics used resemble those of Rommel or Guderian before their famous stroll into France back in 1940.
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