It was Valentine’s day yesterday. After 34 years of marriage the romantic gloss may have worn a little thin (I will be waiting a week until prices go down before I buy flowers, for instance) but I always spend the day reflecting on how lucky I am.

When that day is Wednesday, it’s even better, because we get to spend the day together. Well, apart from the times I was napping or reading, and the times she nipped out to the shops and did a few household things,. Not actually sure what the things were, but they were noisy and I know better than to complain that it’s difficult to concentrate on reading with her making all that noise. It only leads to discussions comparing our relative contributions in the field of housework. Mine are, to be honest, negligeable, which is why I tend towards silence.

We had our traditional Valentine’s day meal – steak, oven chips, onion rings, mushrooms and grilled tomatoes. We also had pepper sauce and sweetcorn – o0ne because I was tempted whilst ordering the groceries and the other because we had half a tin left in the fridge from the weekend’s fried rice.

Julia cooked, because she does steak better than I do. It’s edible when I do it, but the smell of burning fat does tend to fill the house. That’s why I do a lot of casseroles and roasting. I am not really to be trusted with a frying pan.

Having said that, I did produce some fine pancakes on Tuesday. They arrived in a packet and just needed heating. I used a couple of dry frying pans for that and soon had two plates of pancakes ready with maple syrup and lemon juice. We have maple syrup available as Julia uses it in making one of her array of exotic vegetarian recipes. I prefer Golden Syrup but it tends to lead to stickiness and weight gain due to my childlike love of syrup sandwiches. I really should learn to have pancakes with lemon and ditch all the liquid sugar, but it’s just too tempting.

Meanwhile there were several romantic films on TV, including something new by the BBC, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (if adultery is actually romantic), Notting Hill and, on one of the later channels, Naked Attraction. It’s an odd mix, and one that will provide plenty of material for future academics.

I have linked to Naked Attraction because some of my readers may not be familiar with it. You are to be congratulated on this as it is, along with ll forms of reality TV and “scripted reality”, “the museum of social decay”, as Gary Oldman says.

It’s always difficult knowing where to post links. I have the same problem with footnotes in poetry. They are quite popular in Haibun, but I always worry about them. Do I appear condescending if I add a note? Do I appear “difficult” if I don’t?

However, it’s a good thing I did look up Gary Oldman, because I actually wrote “Gary Olsen” first, He was a great actor but he didn’t say anything about reality TV.