Off The Grid with Luke Coleman - Our man in Iraq Being a singleton, and having been one for a few years now, I allow myself some deep resentments and self-hatred around Valentine’s Day. Why doesn’t anyone want to get with this? Dontcha wish your boyfriend was weak like me? And so, with this misery in place a couple of years ago, I headed to T Bar, the authentically tacky US-style sports pub. I plugged myself into a podcast, smoked, drank with determined speed – even my pint had a partner in the whisky by its side. Before long I was sat at a table with Orlando (Crowcroft, author of Rock In A Hard Place, about metal in the ME), and some other guy (whose name escapes me, but he is author of some truly terrible Vice pieces about life in the region). We drank, I stitched myself up on the bill, and as the 14th turned into the 15th we stumbled out onto the street, pissed, laughing and hungry. Directly opposite was a patcha restaurant of good repute. Patcha is workers’ grub. The establishments open late at night / early in the morning, to serve stuffed intestines, brain soup and boiled offal concoctions at rock bottom prices to day labourers, setting them up for whatever work they can get in the ensuing hours. “It’s Valentine’s goddammit, and I’m having genitals in my mouth!” I slurred. And so I had a gunn kebab. Sheep’s bollocks to you and I, and it was all I hoped for as I sobbed an internal cry of loneliness. This year I might give them a miss.