AS it is February 14 and I am a Trained Journalism Professional, I am required by law to present you with some sort of top tips for a terrific Valentine's Day story in which I'm supposed to be perky and upbeat while describing all the fun things – or even better, quirky things – you could do with your special someone, even if you haven't booked anything yet.

All this will be an obvious lie. If you haven't booked anything yet fella, you are up Celibate Creek without an oar.

But I need to write something about Valentine's Day and you need to cling to hope, so let's do this.

Because there's all sorts of fun, quirky things you could do – such as an Indoor Rail Picnic!

Obviously you can't actually book into a nice restaurant at this point, and the weather's more conducive to outdoor ice hockey than picnics.

But you can just get all your favourite picnic treats, a bottle of wine, and for just a few quid get a return ticket on a local train where you can spread everything out on the plastic 1980s table.

Isn't that delightfully quirky?

Isn't it like something the whimsical Zooey Deschanel would do on that C4 show of hers if only it was set some place where Mansfield Woodhouse was attainable by train?

And let's face it, you'll have as much romantic fun on the 17:55 to Worksop as you will at an actual restaurant.

This is not to speak disparaging of our local restaurant professionals, who will be working valiantly tonight to create the sort of atmosphere which makes it vaguely feasible that married people who quietly loathe each other might go home and have their semi-annual 15 minutes of perfunctory amore.

This is a rough time for restaurant professionals.

By mid-February they've just about got over the Christmas season, which for them is a month of shoving tables together so that people can wear paper hats, drink enough that they can just about imagine they're having a good time with people from the office, shovel some Chicken a la Oh Who Cares You People Are Drunk Anyway down their pieholes, and basically rip through the restaurant like a hurricane.

A hurricane who is a functioning alcoholic and doesn't tip.

So that happens, and then we just abandon the restaurant people for six weeks while we go to the gym and eat salads and attempt not to spend money on anything other than wheatgrass.

And then, just when the restaurant professionals are considering packing it in and going off to study accountancy or pest removal like dad always said, here we come again.

Only now it's just for one night and rather than ramming all the tables together, they've got to group them all into twos.

Yep, tables for two. Because now restaurant professionals have something more fun to contend with than the office worker who only drinks once a year – the married couple who only attempts to speak to each other once a year.

Which they will do while ordering from the three-course 30-quid set menu.

It's an unspeakable horror. Honestly, view a restaurant on Valentine's Day and it looks like a scene from some dystopian sci-fi future world.

People are sat in rigid two-by-two groupings in little mating compounds, choosing one of two or three items from a specially designed menu of foods to consume along with the reasonably priced house bottle of inhibition relaxer.

YOU ARE HAVING A SEXY FUN TIME NOW, CITIZEN.

This is the face of humanity on February 14, and it is one of unrelenting doom, misery and Spanish wine.

So anyway, Top Tips for a Terrific Valentine's Day!

You could always try to make a card or gift. This is particularly sweet because … okay, look. I'll come clean with you. That is a profoundly stupid idea. Like, what are you, 11? I'm so sorry.

It's just that we Trained Journalism Professionals have to turn this stuff out every year, and it's not like we can just turn up again and write "buy her some flowers and take her to that restaurant she likes, idiot." So cut me some slack, yeah?

Wait, that came out wrong. What I meant was, whether you're delayed near Sutton Parkway station, frantically attempting to glue coloured macaroni onto cardboard or staring into the bleak face of humanity over a set-price menu, remember that the most important ingredient in a successful Valentine's Day is sincerity.

Ha, right? Seriously though, it's tequila. Now go get some and see if the petrol station has any flowers left before she gets home.