AS A gift, what would please you the most – a couple of gallons of petrol or a huge bouquet of flowers? They’d set you back about the same, but the fuel would be the most practical present to have given your beloved yesterday.

Like everything else, romance has fallen victim to the economic downturn. No longer do you wake up to lavish bunches of red roses delivered to your door from Interflora. Instead, your man will trawl the web to check out whether a bunch of blooms at Netto are cheaper than those at Aldi.

This may sound unlikely, but some budget supermarkets tried to lure male customers with low prices and the promise that there was no indication on the packaging to reveal where the flowers were from.

Should you have been hoping that your man might have arranged a night away at a romantic country hotel, think again. As blokes tighten their belts, such treats have been abandoned in favour of Travelodge, although to my mind that’s just as much fun. Who needs four-poster beds, which I always imagine are thick in dust and creepy-crawlies?

Some frugal fellas may go further and take the tent – at least you’d be sure to cuddle up close, if you don’t get frostbite first.

You may have to accept that the romantic candlelit dinner you’d dreamed about is now a bargain bucket under the fluorescent glare of KFC.

Champagne will be replaced with Cava, chocolates with Haribo (apparently some men have been known to propose using a Haribo ring), and scented candles will be snuffed out in favour of low-energy light bulbs. So what if they make you look like ashen-faced zombies, cash has to be saved.

And if you love those padded, heart-shaped cards, I’m sorry – even they tend now be home-made, as men and women wrack their brains to remember what they learned from Blue Peter and go to work on an empty Cheerios box. Some may have gone the extra mile and added a bit of lace from the curtains, or if they wanted to be cheeky, their knickers, to give their greeting a professional look.

Not that any of these recession-busting changes will affect me. When, for 364 days, you communicate only over what to buy for that night’s tea, whose turn it is to put out the bins, and who forgot to replace the loo roll, it is hard to pull off one night of candlelit dinners and gazing longingly into each other’s eyes.

In our house, Valentine’s Day came and went without us even noticing – which, on a positive note, is a really cheap way of dealing with it.