So sorry, dear Valentine

As local legend has it, the hopeful young man takes roses to a girl on Valentine’s Day. Jeez, she cries, I can’t eat flowers!

She would have preferred bread, maize meal, cooking oil or sugar for her empty cupboard.

Economic malaise hurts all the year’s days of celebration, sacred or secular ones.  The illustration here, cribbed from Tik Toc, is terrific.

The bouquet of ten 100 local dollar bills, our highest denomination note, is worthless as our  exchange rate swings between Z$ 14,500 to US $1 and 18,000-1

A single loaf of bread costs Z$ 12,000 or twelve of these Zimdollar posies. A savoury four-mouthful snack to ward off any growling hunger pangs sells for 40 American cents, five posies.

Valentine’s Day is  meant to be a celebration of love and mutual respect, but not necessarily fidelity, going back to Roman times.

A  mistress here is known as “a small house,” as opposed to the family house. You can have more than one at any given time.

(Left) Dream on, ladies. In a radio talk show the presenter told of how three small houses pursued the same married man for gifts on Feb. 14.

In this patriarchal society there are cultural and family pressures to get married and have children no later than the age of 25. It’s little wonder so many hasty unions end up on the rocks.

On Valentine’s eve, Tilda Moyo, an agony aunt on Star FM, questioned a lady who ran away from her philandering and violent husband and, typically, never has received maintenance for their kids. Domestic violence is not uncommon.  Nor is it uncommon for our brothers to stay out for whole nights or longer, returning home smelling of cheap perfume.

If I had a spouse and if I did anything like that I would get home to find my clothes thrown out onto the front lawn. The

key would be for me to have had a watertight alibi.

And there is the brother who prepares a raunchy, lustful Valentine’s phone message to his small house but presses the wrong keys and his wife’s locked phone pings. She is in the kitchen cooking dinner.  He puts her iPhone under his arm, goes to the toilet and it falls into the bowl when, as he claims, he was unzipping his fly with both hands.

“So sorry darling, you got a message and I was bringing you the phone in case it was urgent …”

He gets the medal for quick thinking.

Praise the gods, wherever they are. He put marital catastrophe on hold for the time being. Until the next slip-ups.

Here’s a more welcome Valentine’s US dollar bouquet.