I could be a heist-ish person. I can be sneaky. Look: Shhh...

I hate shopping at any time around Valentine's Day. But it's a necessary evil, I live (conveniently) in the middle of town (the general term for where the shops are in York) and I happen to be a strong believer in retail shopping.

Yesterday I'd sank into one of my black moods and I left school at lunchtime, I'd pulled that string thing in one leg (hamstring? Hammerstring? Something like that) and I couldn't walk all the way home easily, so I took the bus into town with the sole intention of going home and lying in bed for the rest of the night.

Then just randomly I thought I needed to buy another DVD for film studies.

And maybe a couple of other DVDs...

And a Indiana Jones box set (so sue me).

And then I went to Lush. Lush is amazing. Lush is the shop that you can smell from the other end of the street. It's a shop full of bath bombs and soaps and face masks and yum. I stopped at a counter. Something smelled INCREDIBLY of chocolate. On a whim I bought shower jelly, which I love because you can hurl it at the bathroom mirror and it explodes everywhere (Don't tell my mum that... Jesus...) and it's a nice change to a normal shower when you rub jelly into your hair and you smell kind of like what I imagine Jesus would smell like if he took a shower.

And then I went to Starbucks. Every time I go into Starbucks I always try to convince myself that I'm not being stripped of my hard-earned quids every time I take a sip, but when a cheesecake and a coffee to go add up to £4.80 (Approx. $8.50), I feel kinda like I out to have someone feeding me my amazing blueberry swirl cheesecake.

By this point I was feeling a little less like I wanted to die, and despite the fact that EVERYWHERE I was seeing smug couples holding Anne Summers bags (lingerie galore), I felt kinda great because I was walking through town with a HMV bag and a Lush bag, and I basically looked like any stereotypical, perpetually single person does at this time of year: Rough around the edges, with a bath bomb in one bag and a romantic film in the other.

Well they were WRONG because I actually had shower jelly and The Italian Job.

I really want a Mini Cooper.

Anyway, I am being utterly oblivious to Valentine's Day this year as I am every year and because my B-E-A-Utiful True Blood calendar also tells me that it is Chinese New Year on the 14th so I'm celebrating that instead.

SUCK ON THAT, HALLMARK!