We rated Sainsbury’s Valentine’s Day gifts based on how dead love truly is

Valentine's Day is consumerist bullshit designed to weaken your self esteem to a point where you download Tinder Gold, or text the girls "got no plans haha, fancy a Galentine's Day at mine? Can you bring some Echo Falls and choc please x", Valentine's Day reaches out, red, fluffy and adorned with glittery hearts, and screams if you're not in love you're not worthy of BEING ALIVE in your face, Valentine's Day drains your wallet two weeks before payday and then all you have to show for it is a half-eaten box of chocolates and a hickey on your neck, Valentine's Day is fucking shit for everyone and we all know it, why are we going through this year after year, oh my God I hate it.

If this universal truth wasn't one already so known it's second nature (Valentine's Day is bollocks, mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, contactless payments are just too easy, aren't they Carol), Sainsbury's Fallowfield are doing a great job of making it even more transparent.

Here's an honest, scientifically accurate and completely bitter rating of every Valentine's Day gift they have on offer this year, based on how dead love truly is.

'Girls Just Wanna Have Fun' Flamingos

9/10 dead

Listen, this tune slaps. It is not my fault, either, that Cyndi Lauper belted out such a banger, do not blame me for this. But condensing her ecstatic pop anthem and love letter to fervent youth and femininity into a tinny speaker inside a fluffy toy flamingo? I have had enough, never play this song again, let cancel culture take it, set it adrift in the stream of irrelevance and let it crash into a waterfall, I fucking hate this, who came up with it, please get them fired.

'Love Really Hurts Without You' Turtles

10/10 dead

Along the same vein as the Girls Just Wanna Have Fun Flamingos, this is essentially a fluffy turtle that sings Love Really Hurts Without You. Oh, and the legs and neck move.

Buying this for your significant other would only feel like a good idea if the end of your relationship was in touching distance, an act of bone-deep desperation so harrowing you fork out £ on a fluffy green turtle that sings. So what if you forgot to compliment Rob's mum on her new haircut, this will make up for things, you're sure of it. Please get a grip, this is not romance, this is horror presenting itself as kitschy ironic plush, this is death itself. Love is completely dead. 10/10.

'You're alright, you are' on a mug

7/10 dead

Nothing says romance more than a mug. Better yet, nothing screams undying commitment more than a mug bearing the inscription ‘You’re alright, you are’. Make your significant other feel truly special by reminding them that they’re not shit, at least. Not great, just not shit. Like you.

'You are my Lobster' Lobsters

5/10 dead

Only Friends fans will enjoy this, and that says it all. Whilst to the average fan of the shit show that the series is, this would be adorable and the ultimate niche Valentine’s gift, to the untrained eye it just looks like a slightly scary lobster fetish.

T-Rex water bottle

8/10 dead

A present suitable only for five-year-olds or the mentally insane. When you purchase this at the self-checkouts, take a good hard look at yourself in the camera-screen and ask if your mother held you in her womb for nine long months, only for you to spend the little money you have on an item that most children would throw in the bin or burn.

Faux rose petals

7/10 dead

At least you tried. You tried to be a seductive, romantic love-maker. You tried to be spontaneous. You tried to emulate those dickheads on social media, who throw rose petals around every room, light 1,000 candles, run a bubble bath and buy their girlfriend £150 worth of lingerie. But ultimately, all you did was go to Sainsbury's and by little scraps of cloth resembling the petals that you could have got from an actual rose, you cheap and weird human. She's going to buy a vibrator and dump you, Michael, and she will be better off for it.