Valentine’s Day was spent drunkenly caterwauling karaoke at the Bloomsbury Bowling Lanes. I belted out a version of ‘My Sharona’ so atrocious that even now, five days on, I cringe thinking about it. Steve went to watch some football and showed up at 9.30, but we did manage to have some romantic quality time together, kicking Mags’s and Emerald’s asses at table football. We don’t celebrate Valentine’s (let’s call it by its initials, VD, for speed of typing) but I still get upset when I don’t get a card or anything. Steve insists we agreed years ago that we instead celebrate ‘Ily and Steve Day’, the date of which is pretty fluid and generally falls a few days after VD, when all the soppy-eyed fools have gone back to sitting on the couch watching University Challenge, and the restaurant menus have returned to normal. So it was on Monday that I arranged to meet my husband at Mason’s, a restaurant in Ladywell we’d been wanting to try for years. It has a three-course evening menu for £13, so in the interests of staying local and staying cheap, he’d booked a table. The food was pretty good, and at that price you can’t really complain. Steve also gave me a big bunch of tulips and a lovely card of a cat doing yoga. Who says romance is dead? Happy I&SD!

Things to look forward to

Right this minute, as I type, my sister is in hospital preparing to give birth. I am on Baby Standby and obsessively checking my phone several times an hour for updates. She’s not fully in labour yet, so can still lie around texting me about how bored she is.

Holiday in France. At the end of May, we and some friends are going to the south of France for a week of wine, cheese, swimming in our own pool, eating amazing seafood, riding bikes (basically the entire holiday is going to be Flight of the Conchords’ foux de fa fa made real) and wafting around in maxi dresses. CAN’T WAIT.

Today is Fatty Thursday! Forget Fat Tuesday, or Shrove Tuesday to give it its boring name. Tlusty Czwartek is the day in Poland where you make donuts and eat them all. My mum is doing the former, and I’m popping round later to help out with the other bits.

Things to not look forward to

Just been to the doctor, who diagnosed me with ‘classic sciatica’. Yippee. It doesn’t hurt, but my left leg is a bit numb and tingly and feels cold. No more aerobics for me, just swimming and a bit of yoga.