BUGGER: we thought oats were syn free! Not sure why – so we cooked the breakfast below without thinking and thoroughly enjoyed it, but it was only when an eagle-eyed reader (hello Lisa!) pointed out our mistake that we realised! So this comes out at 12 syns a portion. Good lord. Tasty mind…very rare we cock up but oops!

Oooh has there every been a more dramatic, more twist-filled, more suspenseful storyline than Eastender’s Who Killed Lucy plot? Yes, many times. Anyway, everyone knows she was killed by some livid fashion designer who grew tired of her wearing that awful grey bloody suit.

Paul broke The Rule today. We both agreed that we wouldn’t buy each other a Valentines gift because we’re saving up for something big, and for once in my life I decided to stick to it. Normally I roll my eyes and buy a gift anyway whenever people do that – my nana is a particular bugger for it – ‘OOOH DON’T MAKE A FUSS ETC’ but if you turned up on Christmas Day with a card, well-wishes and lack of present, she’d sit there like you’d swapped her sherbet lemons for hard-boiled piss. But no, this year I stuck to the rules, and Paul promptly presented me with a new bottle of Tom Ford’s Grey Vetiver – my favourite scent in the whole world. He’d done well, soaked in all my hints in the car journey on the way home from work, gone to John Lewis and promptly forgot the name and scent – managed to find it by describing it to the perfume lady and through scent alone! Normally I smell like chips and shame, so it’ll make a change to smell all classy like. In my defence, I did ask him whether he’d want a Vivienne Westwood necklace that I’d seen, but he replied by saying that it was a bit too gay. It’s as if the last eight years of sodomy and frotting never happened.

Nevertheless, I had a trick up my sleeve. I’ve secured a white t-shirt out of the wardrobe, hastily printed a picture of Barack Obama on it and turned it into my ‘YES, WE CAN’ shirt, meaning that if he asks me to do something, the answer will automatically be yes. It’s fun and it’s free – what price dignity? I’m glad we don’t own a pool though, a day like this can easily end up turning sour (the “Barrymore Effect”) and the last thing I want is to be found face-down in a swimming pool with a bumhole like a windsock and ‘anal trauma’ on my death certificate. So lord knows what I’ll end up doing today, but at least I’m not The Worst Husband in the World anymore.

Paul’s Valentines card to me was ace, though:

And mine, in return, was equally as lovely:

Mine’s printed on recycled ice-lolly sticks, meaning I’d already given Paul wood by the time we had got out of bed this morning, which I’m sure you’ll agree is incredibly efficient. I only noticed one of the whales had lipstick and mascara on when I got the card home, but that’s alright, we’re both confident young men who are at ease with our roles.

Speaking of roles, or rolls, you want to lose some – so here’s today’s breakfast recipe. I wanted to do something nice for breakfast that hasn’t been done yet, and this hits the target. If you’re a fan of overnight oats, give this a whirl – it’s a savoury use for the oats, and creates a thick, stodgy but delicious breakfast, using all the main bits of a full cooked breakfast!

to make full english breakfast savoury oats you will need:

400g normal oats that you’d use for porridge but not ones with added sugar – you’re allowed 35g for a HEB, so I worked out that if everyone was using their HEB, that leaves 260g of oats, which is around forty five syns each – so for the sake of argument, that’s around 11.5 syns per portion, two stock cubes made into 800ml of stock with a tsp of soy sauce added, 2 onions very finely chopped, a pack of Weight Watchers Cumberland Sausages (4 syns per pack, this serves four, so these will be half a syn) – take four and take the skin off, crumble the sausagemeat into a bowl, and set the other four aside, two eggs, a handful of cherry tomatoes quartered, bacon medallions cut into thin strips, salt, pepper, chilli flakes.

to make full english breakfast savoury oats you should:

get everything chopped and ready to go. You’ll need two frying pans here. In one, cook off the onion and bacon until nice and soft and cooked through, then chuck in the sausage meat. In the other pan, gently fry off the sausages (or you can use an Actifry for this). Let the sausages in both pans cook through, add the tomatoes to the onion and sausagemeat, still cook. Once the whole sausages are cooked, set aside and chop into discs when cool. To make the savoury porridge, tip the oats and soy/stock into a microwaveable bowl, cook for about two minutes until it goes nice and stodgy, then chuck the lot into the bacon and onion and tomato mix and cook off on a medium heat to dry it out a bit. Whilst that’s occuring, fry off two eggs in your other pan that had the sausages on. Assemble on a plate, add the sausage discs, fried egg and lots of black pepper and salt.

extra-easy: well, no – there’s not 1/3 superfree in there, but you could have a few pieces of fruit during the day to counter it. Let your hair down, it’s Valentines Day.

Listen, seriously now – try this. It was delicious – almost a bit haggis-like. You could add chilli sauce, use different sausages, add peppers, all sorts. It’s stodgy, filling and very tasty!

By the way, it was totally Abi who killed Lucy, with Max helping to cover it up. Cheers.

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