Valentine’s Day clearly a situationship best avoided

Valentine’s Day in the modern world takes an awful lot of planning, so with only eight days to go now I hope you’ve got all your ducks in a row. Have you, for example, decided which vomitous menus of romantic pink food you’re not going to touch with a bargepole? Do you know for sure which overstretched high street restaurants full of slobbering grockles kneeling to film themselves proposing to warty overdressed girlfriends you are going to firebomb first? Have you booked your one-way ticket to the furthest place away from Paris you can find? Is the underground bunker from which you plan to wait out the foetid aftermath of lovemageddon well stocked with tinned fruit and bog roll?Good. Except it’s too late. For the whole basis of romantic love, which is annually besmirched by the Valentine’s charade, has been finally blown to smithereens this year by the availability of “situationship” cards.

I need hardly tell you what a “situationship” is. Because, like all words and phrases invented by the pansexual post-Tinder generation, it means “an excuse to shag whoever you like”. Endorsing this dismal coinage in The Sunday Times, “dating expert” Amy Chan explained, “the digital landscape fosters an environment where casual or undefined relationships are more accessible and prevalent than ever before”. But it is just another facet of the sad truth that all modern young people do all day is hump and grind like monkeys and then attempt to dignify it with neologism.

If you meet another dogwalker in the park and roger them in a bush, congratulations, you’re in a dalmatianship. Find yourself shagging two people one day, three people the next and six by the end of the week — what a lovely inflationship. Got lucky in a broom cupboard at the Tory conference? That’s a onenationship. Horizontal jogging to pass the time with a hot cosmonaut while in orbit, 250 miles above sea level? It’s the start of a beautiful internationalspacestationship.

Honest to God, I don’t begrudge our miserable, hopeless modern young the priapic end-of-days bonkathon they’re all on, but I wish they’d stop trying to pretend each grubby random act of coition is anything more than what my old man used to call “a sneeze in the loins”.

55-year-old apprentices

Mind you they’re not all bad, the young. I’m a big fan of Tony Blair’s boy Euan and his mission to get more young people into job-focused internships and off the increasingly pointless university treadmill. I always regret that I wasted three years of my life drinking, reading and playing cricket, when I could have been making tea in a solicitor’s office or licking stamps for some crapulent MP. So imagine my delight that young Blair’s company, Multiverse, is to offer apprenticeships to people aged 55 and over “to avoid a generation being left behind in an increasingly technological workplace”.I turn 55 in a few months’ time and do indeed struggle with technology. So I’m wondering if there might be something for me at an Apple Genius Bar, perhaps, or in the customer service department of one of the big streaming companies. I could start with doing the lunchtime sandwich run and eventually work my way up to telling customers to try switching it off and switching it on again.

Griddle me this

Speaking of technology, why is it that whenever the internet decides (for no apparent reason) that I might be a robot, it asks me to look at a grid of photos and identify the “bicycles” or “fire hydrants”? Leaving aside that it is not clear about whether it means whole bicycles or just bits of them and often denies me access on the basis that, having ticked the box with little more than the corner of a mudguard in it I must be some sort of phone-thieving Dalek, is this really the best we can do to sniff out the rapacious foot soldiers of artificial intelligence? After all, ChatGPT can write a reasonably convincing Russian novel in four seconds, so is showing it blurry photos of zebra crossings really the way to keep outwitting it?