AS an Irish citizen, I would have waded into this whole Panti / Iona thing earlier but I live in Brighton where everyone is busy bringing up their ordinary children in ordinary same sex households and getting married to whoever they ordinarily love without further ado, and to be honest it passed me by.

LIKE every non-attached human under the age of one hundred who is keen to pair up with another, you are probably internet dating.

IT is a universal truth that a single parent in a chaotic household will be in want of a dog.

PICTURE this. The changing rooms in a health club. Two ladies in expensive tennis gear, lightly sweating, zipping their racquets away. One is saying to the other: “I’m incandescent. He made an appointment with the builder to come at nine on Monday to redo the conservatory. He KNOWS I play tennis on Monday.”

Love in the digital age means you can whisper sweet nothings via text, tweet, Facebook, email, or any of the dozen digital methods of communication colonised by teenagers.

PEOPLE always moan about January. There’s even a made up date, invented by some travel company, which is supposedly the worst day of the year, and therefore the one on which you should book your holiday to get away from it all.

SO that’s it then. All over. All you have to look forward to now is watching your New Year’s resolutions float off and pop like empty bubbles, one by one, so that in another few weeks you will be paying for a gym membership that will remain unused until you figure out a way of legally extricating yourself from it without incurring a mortgage-sized penalty.

SO how was it for you? Any good stuff? Or is it all going straight to the charity shop? Never mind.

YOU read about what a hard time single parents have, how awful our lives are, how we never leave the house, or get a weekend off, or meet anyone with the intention of forming a meaningful, hot relationship.

This month 100 years ago, the British food writer, Elizabeth David, was born.