I absolutely love festivals: I take pride in carving my pumpkin, I hunt Easter eggs and I turn my flat into a twinkling grotto at Christmas, as well as throwing paints, jumping fires etc for several other lesser known celebrations.

I’m also a resolute romantic: getting up in the night to watch Robert Redford wash Meryl Streep’s hair in “Out of Africa”, shamefully crying when I hear Enrique sing “Hero” and my bedside book collection is Austen biased. Therefore Valentine’s should be my favourite date ever. But it’s not. February 14th makes us feel loved-up, if we’re lucky, but more often unappreciated or desperate.

What do you do in the capital if Valentine’s means contemplating your navel, not someone else’s? A buzzing social life and a successful career leave little time for what the majority of people consider the most important aspect of their life. We increasingly live alone, so cannot rely on flatmates to produce interesting chums; we are establishing our careers, therefore we meet few new faces at the coffee machine; there is no longer a strong community, so we can’t rely on the girl/boy next door.

Yet the suggested solutions offer little hope. Despite our admiration of the vibrant Yankee dating scene, singletons this side of the pond seem incapable of emulating it. It would be easy to blame the British reserve, but how many of us keep our upper lip stiff nowadays?

Facebook, MySpace and innumerable on-line dating sites make it simple to strike up random acquaintances, but does anything ever come of them? We’ve all got a story: “a woman from work’s brother met his girlfriend on the internet…”. But personally I’ve never met a real-life internet couple. Not only do people appear to grossly misrepresent themselves, but most guys think on-line equates shedding clothes and most girls hope it means wedding oaths.

Speed-dating is yet to shake its (in my experience, justified) reputation as a superficial, aggressive system for meeting weirdos.