A point slightly lower than the Marianas Trench

14st 7lb; 9.4 units of alcohol yesterday – no, let’s be honest and call it 10; 1,450 days to go (a nice round number); Rockall.

So here it is again; the day of the year which only Christmas Day can hope to rival as the low point of every singleton’s life. And, let’s face it, Valentine’s Day wins the contest hands down every time.

It didn’t start well when I found that my recent weight loss had gone into reverse, but then I suppose it’s hardly surprising given the amount of alcohol I consumed yesterday. But I was working hard outdoors under what might be described as a blazing sun, certainly by the standards of Northumberland in February, and I felt I deserved a glass of beer with my lunch. So I opened a bottle of Adnams, which advised me in the small print on the back that it contained 2.8 units of alcohol. (You get into the habit of reading the small print on the backs of bottles, jars and packets, when the only obvious alternative is attempting to strike up an intelligent conversation with a Border terrier.)

Then I felt I deserved another one with my supper, and of course it’s frightfully moreish so one bottle wasn’t quite enough. That got me to an outrageous total of 8.4 units, but I was still perfectly sober and hardly felt as though I’d participated in some sort of binge drinking orgy, even though the Government tells me that I shouldn’t be consuming more than 3 – 4 units a day and 21 per week. More fool me to put this on a blog, I suppose. There goes my chance of ever getting any treatment on the NHS, even before I confess to having had a large malt whisky as a nightcap.

Guess how many cards I got this morning. Go on, guess. You’re right, of course, and not just on the technicality that Royal Mail don’t actually manage to deliver around here until the afternoon.

I kept checking my e-mails in the hope that someone would respond to my column and encourage me to whisk myself away from all this. Preferably to some sort of orgy, at which binge drinking would be permissible but not obligatory. No such luck. As predicted, I ended up alone on the sofa (even the dog sugared off to bed rather than cosying up to me) watching Ashes to Ashes. Which is, as numerous correspondents have pointed out to me, markedly inferior to the original and best Life on Mars. But there is one critical difference from the point of view of the late-middle-aged male viewer from the North East, namely that I never actually fancied John Simm. Keeley Hawes, on the other hand … well, the name alone does it for me. There can’t be many actresses named after a brothel in Tokyo entirely staffed by girls from New Zealand. I wonder whether it was the inspiration of her parents or of Equity?