Be still, my beating heart…hardly a practical suggestion, leading as it would to instant death. This incredible muscle may upon occasions quicken, but for most of the time it just does its job. Every day it pumps 2,000 gallons of blood around our bodies, beating more than 2.5 billion times for an average lifespan, until one day… it stops.
Only for the last 500 years has this noble organ been associated with love. We now implore the object of our affections to give their heart to us, to un-break it, to cherish it. Every year it features in stylised form. The familiar red motif, which bears little resemblance to its physical form, makes an appearance on the plethora of cards and gifts exchanged between lovers – or married couples – on February 14th.
Why that date? February is a time when winter still holds us in its grasp and any flowers we give will have been plucked from foreign soils. St Valentine’s heart was stopped when he suffered the fury of the Emperor Claudius II in 269CE, after failing to convert Claudius to Christianity. He was simultaneously flogged, stoned and beheaded, a worse fate than either trying to book a table for two on the 14th, or seeing how a bouquet of red roses has, for the day, shot up in price.
So, if you’re looking for a more original gift idea for your loved one this weekend than the usual clichés, look no further. I bring you a selection of the more obscure and original ideas for that special person (or people – I judge not) in your life.
Raging love
Let’s be honest, you probably, at times, inadvertently anger your loved one. Or if by some miracle you’re a saint whose every action is looked upon by your inamorata with joy and love, chances are that their boss / children / parents, or failing that, politicians of any hue, have driven them up the wall. So help them free their minds of hate so they can turn their thoughts to love – book them a session in a Rage Room!
Rage Rooms are the safe, controlled outlets for our most visceral expressions of love’s opposite. The perfect place where one can – armed with a variety of instruments – destroy broken TVs, crockery or whatever other detritus is to hand, often accompanied to music of one’s choice (and I would recommend “Killing in the Name” for this particular venture). Let your lover loose with a blunt tool to destroy to their heart’s content at any one of these locations: Colchester, Norwich, Cambridge, and Bedford. Pre-booking advised.
There are other activities on offer at some of these locations e.g. axe throwing, retro gaming and airsoft shooting.
Perhaps a rage room is too dynamic an expression of your raging love. For something altogether gentler, you could give a HedgeHug. The Beds, Cambs and Northants Wildlife Trust is offering the chance to Adopt a Species, from Hedgehogs to Highland cows. Other conservation charities run similar fund raising programmes allowing you to express your love for nature.
However if adopting an elephant, warthog or beetle is not quirky enough, you could take a leaf out of a museum curator’s book. Using materials at hand – in his case bones – he crafted his own heart warming message.
Playing Cupid
The 80s band ABC memorably sung about shooting a poisoned arrow to the heart. And of course Cupid is depicted as an amorous archer, so why not gift your beau a bow ?
At Wildtracks near Newmarket, archery is on offer as well as quad biking, go-karting, clay pigeon shooting and motocross.
White Dragon Activities near Colchester offer archery, axe-throwing, airguns and woodland survival courses – just in case things turn sticky and you need to lay low for a while…
At Grey Goose in Downham Market, you can shelter from the elements and use their indoor range while channelling your inner Robin Hood or Maid Marian.
Bowling your beloved over
Now, cricket is the sport in which “one bowls a maiden over” but, as that’s not really possible in this weather, why not take the concept indoors? Take your loved one for a bit of ten-pinning.
No matter where you are in East Anglia, it’s always fun to watch your partner bend over as they select which ball to play with and then launch it down [Ed: just stop there, this is a family publication].
Find a venue near you with Ten Pin or Hollywood Bowl. Independents include Go Bowling (Dunstable), Ace of Lanes (Bishops Stortford) and Bury Bowl (Bury St Edmunds). Most ten-pin bowling alleys have other activities on offer, too.
The taste of love
Who doesn’t like chocolate? Whoever they are, I wouldn’t trust them. These delicacies ensure I am the proud possessor of a body built for comfort not for speed. And according to a Spanish foreign correspondent reporting back from Edwardian London:
For an English lover, an evening of love is an evening in which many chocolates have been eaten.
Yes, of course, you can’t throw a brick in most shopping centres without it hitting a Thorntons, Hotel Chocolat or similar. However, in Halstead, Essex, there’s something more unusual… much more unusual.
In case you were wondering about the illustration at the top of this article, that’s a human heart…made of chocolate. At The Edible Museum, the sculptor Sarah Hardy sculpts objects – be they hearts, crow’s skulls, human brains, dung beetles – and these are used to make moulds, which are then used to make incredible works of art which happen to be edible.
Now whether giving your loved one a chocolate toad is endearing or not, I’ll leave for you to decide. But, well, at least it’s an original thought. And it is, as they say, the thought that counts.
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