It may have escaped your attention but it's Fathers Day on Sunday and if you still haven't found the perfect gift well let me be the one to help.  I find that men are the hardest people to buy for, most dads, well you ask them what they want and they say either very little or just tell you not to buy anything for them.

Let me start by mentioning the lovely people at Hallmark who pretty much furnished my children, my friends and their friends with Fathers Day cards, they sent a truly splendid selection as well of their very cute Superhero Itty Bitty's which are now furnishing my desk, it's pretty well known that I love Superman but The Flash is my favourite because he's the only Superhero faster than Superman and he can phase and he can travel in time!!  That's my chosen superpower if ever I get the choice!! 

Other than Superheroes something that a lot of men like (if the dating profiles I read are anything to go by ;) ) is travel and what popped up in my email box this morning?  Yes the lovely folks at Lonely Planet are having a 45% off sale until Sunday, I've already spent way too much (I have about 20 and another 4 on the way) I reckon there's lots of dad pleasers in there and I think it's something he wouldn't necessarily expect to receive so do go check out the Lonely Planet 45% off Sale

Now I wouldn't a photographer if I didn't suggest that maybe, just maybe, you could purchase a gift certificate for fathers day, hey, it's the gift that keeps on giving and you get to be in the photos too, and you know you should always buy gifts you'd love to receive yourself so if you want to make everyone happy, why not buy an all inclusive mini session voucher for just £100  and then bag yourself some gorgeous photos with the people you love.

Now I've had a skirt around the internet and come back to my old friend lastminute.com and they have all kinds of experiences and breaks you could purchase for the man of the moment, sounds like a plan to me, why not go the whole hog and book yourself a sunshiny mini break to somewhere exotic or, well you know, Scotland is lovely at this time of year!!

Hopefully, my little last minute gift guide has helped you to come up with some interesting and unusual ideas to keep the dads in your life happy.  You know, dads are amazing, Abigail and Looby's dad is brilliant, he single-handedly has Abigail living with him 24-7 (barring the times she's at my house) and it can't be easy being a man parenting a teenage girl, I have total respect for him for that, we all make compromises for our kids and I have no doubt in my mind that he's doing a brilliant job, Abigail is a shining example of that so even though we're no longer together I truly want to say, let's hear it for the dads, the single ones, the married ones, the one's who co-parent, the ones who don't get to see their children enough, we make such a massive fuss of Mother's Day and yet Father's Day always seems a much more muted affair, it could, of course, be that we don't celebrate it in my house but I think dad's, on the whole, are just as brilliant as mum's and so they deserve their own special day in the sun being pampered and showered with recognition for the great jobs they do.

Lets talk about how crap Valentines day is!

Wednesday dear reader, hump day, all down hill into the weekend and I feel I couldn't let this week pass without some kind of mention or reference to Valentines day.

Now I've never been a big fan of the day when we all feel an enforced pressure to tell the people we share our life with that we love them, all of those years being married and it always felt way too forced even if we could usually share those feelings on other days.

It'll be easier this year, I plan to spend the day with Holly the beagle and I'll tell her I love her and she'll give me a wet nose and a snuggle, it's the way forward I feel.

The thing about love though is it's a daily commitment to try to make each others lives better, more wonderful, it'a almost certainly not about garage flowers, crap cards and enforced sentiment.

I've taken the decision no matter where I am or if I am lucky enough to be loved or indeed not loved that I will never celebrate this Hallmark day with crappy tokens of over priced tat ever again.  I'd rather have a day out doing something wonderful and plenty of time together because that's worth 1 million Tesco Valentines cards.

I'm all for showing love and being in love and embracing love but please don't do it just because a card company tell you that you have to!

There's another point here dear reader, imagine if you will, all of the people who might not have a romantic love in their lives, doesn't Valentines day just gesticulate a huge pointy finger at the lonely? There's so much smugness around and I know that I may have been responsible for that myself so I just want to say sorry. I took the decision a while ago to never share my relationship status on social media again, to never even comment on that aspect of my life because really the reality of the situation is that it's a private thing and in the days where we didn't have Facebook we didn't go around in real life with a note on our head saying "It's Complicated" or other such statements.

You know what I hate seeing on Facebook?  When Facebook comments that someone is single again with a broken heart emoticon, how crappy and absurd that is and does anyone (who actually understands what it means) display on their Facebook that they're in an open relationship?

I realise aspects of this blog post may seem, well a little bit ranty and a tad grumpy but you know what?  It is my blog! ha!  The truth is that I have tons of love in my life for which I am truly thankful, I'm happy and content with my lot and generally when I'm not happy you dear reader know about it anyway!

So go forth and love the one you are with and be with the one you love as often as you can be, show them that you love them with kind words and deeds instead of a mass produced card from Morrisons!