VALENTINE’S Day. I’d kind of forgotten about it. Not really applicable when your Valentine isn’t alive anymore. But then it rolls around again, and the radio keeps talking about it which, frankly, is no help at all.
On Monday morning Huw Stephens sitting in for Lauren Laverne on 6 Music played You and Me by The Wannadies which is the most recognisable description of a relationship, or at least my relationship ("Then we watch TV/Until we fall asleep/Not very exciting …"), leaving me in bits. Again.
Thank goodness, then, for LalalaLetMeExplain, for making me laugh about love. The podcaster, author and dating advisor turned up on Nihal Arthanayake on 5 Live on Monday to talk about what she called the ick.
What’s the ick? Glad you asked. “The ick is a feeling of repulsion for somebody who you were once into,” LalalaLetMeExplain, umm, explained.
“It’s that feeling of going from thinking, ‘Wow, I really want to kiss you,’ to ‘if you breathe one more time I’m going to vomit.’
“It could be rational. It could be that you see them eating their bogies enthusiastically. Or it could be completely irrational like they’ve stuck their arm out to wave a taxi or they’ve dropped their gloves on the floor.”
It’s possible that calling yourself LalalaLetMeExplain might give some people the ick, but listening to this I came to rather like “Layla” (as Arthanayake, and presumably her friends, calls her).
She was funny and empathetic, even if I didn’t always believe her take on this phenomenon.
“There is a suggestion that perhaps the ick is evolutionary,” she explained at one point. “For women, we are biologically tuned to want men who are going to be able to look after and protect our babies. This man is going to hold my child and if he’s going to trip over and kill it, we are built to be like, ‘No can’t have that one.’ So, there is some suggestion that some of the clumsy accident prone icks may be an evolutionary thing.”
This sounds like dubious pseudoscience. But then I am a very clumsy man (though, full disclosure, I haven’t dropped my daughters and killed them. Well, not yet at least).
Listeners offered their own ick-related symptoms. “He called the pandemic Panny D,” one said. Which is totally understandable, I’d say. Other icks included “the way he chewed his burger”, “the way he walked to the bar” and “the way she took the bun off her burger spooned mayo onto it and proceeded to tap it down with her fingers”.
“Psychopath, absolute psychopath clearly,” Layla said about that one.
It would appear that public art is an ick for lots of people. In Art Came in the Night (Radio 4, Tuesday), Edinburgh artist Kevin Harman explained what is involved in making public art, the responses to it and how it can be embraced by local communities. Or not. One public artwork in Govan was set on fire. It was suggested that this showed a hands-on engagement and ownership with the art in question, which felt like a slightly optimistic reading.
But this was an interesting programme that asked tough questions of the role of public art but didn’t start from the position that it is some kind of indulgence or imposition. Whether it was in Glenrothes or Dunfermline or Kirkcaldy, Harman found examples of art that is loved by their communities. Well, who wouldn’t want a concrete hippo down their street?
Listen Out For: The Archbishop Interviews, Radio 4, tomorrow, 1.30pm. Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, pictured above, is asking the questions in this new series. His first guest is author Elif Shafak.
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