Not laws – the social obligations we have to create an orderly and civilised society – which I can live by quite happily. Laws not only protect us from others but they protect others from us and that is just.

I am referring to rules, conventions, if you prefer.

Irksome Rule No.1 – You will shower your partner with gifts on 14th February to show them you love them.

We recently had Valentine’s Day – a particular horror of mine. And it seems so ungrateful to grumble about the whole Valentine’s event when one is ‘blessed’ with a husband who always remembers to buy chocolates or flowers or both and encloses soppy greetings in a carefully chosen card. But it is just a convention. You can’t buy romance pre-packaged on the shelf, romance is spontaneous and to my mind there is more romance in the little everyday things you do for each other than you can find in chocolate that widens the hips. We are tied to this convention because the shops say we should so they can sell mega loads of extra trash a few short weeks after the biggest do of the year. I am considerably more grateful to my husband for coming to pick me up from work, day in, day out, even when it is a struggle to get there and he has better things to do – now that is far more meaningful to me. In any case I find it irksome to be tied to this one day of the year for expressing a romantic thought; I might feel more romantic on, say the 16th or the 25th of February, or even the 14th of June. Mind you I’m not much of a romantic and I feel so inadequate when I wake up on Valentine’s Day and remember the date and realise that not only have I not bought a gift of similar value, I haven’t bought one at all, or even a card! I hate spending the day feeling guilty.

I want my ‘romance’ to be a surprise, a gesture out of the blue, and something that comes from the heart – not the pages of a magazine in an article on ‘How to romance your partner’.

I really don’t like my life being organised for me – certainly not by retailers anxious to increase their profit margin. I like life to be serendipitous.

Irksome Rule No.2 – Housework.

Don’t get me started on that one. It’s another area of my life that I apply the Serendipity Principle to (great film, Serendipity, by the way but then John Cusack is lovely!). I enjoy my housework because I don’t make it a chore and I do it when the mood takes me to do it, or when I have completely run out of clean socks and clean cups. So why do I feel so inadequate when I hear people talking about how they HAVE to get up at 6am to get the hovering done. They don’t want to; it’s a chore and a bore. I enjoy a good tidy up and then I can see when something has been done. I cleaned for an elderly lady one time who wanted me to dust the walls every week. – I never went back, I was afraid of losing my mind…and my will to live!

My only house rule is that the bed is made every day. If you make the bed you really don’t need to do anything else!