Valentine’s Day is upon us. I’ve never liked it. As an ugly ginger kid with a beautiful – much older – half-Indian sister, it was torture. Helen was a glamorous air stewardess and never short of cards or flowers. While I sat in my room listening to David Bowie and staring at the Starsky & Hutch posters I’d saved up for, Helen would be getting whisked away in a Mercedes to Joanna’s or some other club in Glasgow. In the run-up to Valentine’s Day 1976, age 12 and desperate for a card, I asked 11-year-old George next door if he would be my boyfriend. He said no. I shrugged and we resumed our den-building with his wee sister Lorna.

Henri, 61, who must be suffering from some kind of arrested development, is looking for a good kisser

Two years ago was the first Valentine’s Day I’d been alone in more than 40 years. I called in to pay a gardener who looks after land surrounding a house I manage. Pierre’s a hunter and on the wall in the open plan living room kitchen was a locked but glass-fronted cabinet stacked with a dozen or so rifles and shotguns. A pair of woodcock lay oven-ready on a roasting tin. Everywhere you looked there were hunters’ knives, ranging from tiny, to large enough to dismember an elephant. Like Gaston in Disney’s Beauty and the........

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