As I've shared many, many times, my proposal to Mrs Guru was up there with the best. It involved spelling out 'Marry Me' in the sand at Compton Bay and then walking her to the cliff edge with a blindfold for a bird's eye view.

The tide had come in and washed away half of the Y so that the message read 'Marr Me' but she got the idea. 

If you want to impress your girlfriend/boyfriend/spouse/life-partner on the Isle of Wight this February, then here are five ideas to get your started, entirely pinched from Instagram.

Please feel free to add other ideas at the bottom of the page if you're a local business owner who is shrewd enough to cash in on romantic fools like myself.

The Isle of Wight Tuk Tuk is a new thing for 2020 and they're doing a deal with The Cow at Tapnell Farm where they'll pick you up and drop you off at the restaurant.

The Ts & Cs say that you need to be within 5 miles of Tapnell Farm, or you can pay a bit extra. I'd suggest that 5 miles is a reasonable limit, as the 20 mile drive from Bembridge to Tapnell Farm might be a wee bit nippy on a February evening.

The Enchanted Manor in Niton must be a contender for the Isle of Wight's most romantic accommodation. They offer four poster beds and a sort of rustic vintage decor which Mrs Guru approves of.

I am hoping that the menu for the Garlic Farm's Valentine's meal won't be garlic flavoured soup followed by garlic tart (served with garlic bread) and garlic ice cream for pudding.

If so, I'd say there's very little chance of finding romance unless the bill comes with a very generous pile of mint imperials. Let's hope that it just provides a nice setting for a romantic meal with only a modest portion of garlic.

How about celebrating Valentines Day with a Chinese New Year themed walk in the woods instead of a romantic meal? According to the official blurb the Spirit of the Orient will be a fusion of sound, colour, illuminations and oriental flavours'. 

Just make sure you pack a woolly hat.

Finally, how about going the whole hog (Ed: surely, you mean Duck?) at The Duck in Ryde. After six courses, you'll want to walk it off along the Esplanade at Appley.

If you run a business and want to promote your Valentines Day plans, please feel free to comment below.

As it was winter prices we could afford to upgrade to a sea view and a hot tub, which made the whole thing a lot more appealing.

There are two adjacent lodge parks at Wootton Bridge called Woodside Bay Lodge Retreat and Woodside Coastal Retreat. They are both run by a company called Darwin Escapes which has about 20 lodge parks around the UK. This is an Isle of Wight website so let’s not worry about those other mainland ones. Suffice to say, the Isle of Wight ones are superior to all of them, even the ones I haven’t visited.

For those with a long memory, the parks sit on the spot (roughly) where Bob Dylan headlined the 1969 Isle of Wight Festival to a crowd of 150,000 including John Lennon and various other stars of the day.

I'd have called the sites Bob and Dylan to avoid confusion, but I have now got a good understanding of the pros and cons of the similarly named parks. If you haven’t already lost interest, please do a drumroll in your head and I'll give a summary.

Woodside Coastal Retreat was built first and is the smaller park. It is right by the beach and some of the lodges called Carisbrooke View and Osborne View are so close to the water that you could probably go fishing from your veranda (although that’s not an invitation to do so). Several of the lodges have hot tubs.

We had three good sized bedrooms, two bathrooms, a dressing area so that we could look our best for the other park residents and an open plan kitchen/diner/lounge. I much prefer ‘lodges’ to ‘caravans’ as they are generally about twice as wide and have proper sized beds rather skinny mattresses.

My dream of looking at the sea whilst sat in my hot tub didn’t quite come true, as the hot tub is sunk into the ground but I enjoyed the novelty of being able to break wind without anyone realising.

Of course, the challenge on an Isle of Wight holiday during January is finding stuff to do as there’s an assumption that the whole Island shuts down on the 1st of November. There is some truth to that, but there is still enough to keep a family entertained for a week.

Our days out included:

• our 94th visit to the Shanklin arcades this year, which resulted in us leaving with another plastic princess toy. It really is lovely feeling that you’re adding your contribution to the world’s landfill.
• a wander along St Helen’s beach, accompanied by dozens of dog walkers.
• an hour staring at the Christmas decorations at Busy Bee Garden Centre, including harmonising penguins and enough breakables to put us on high alert.
• a trip to the Pantomime at Shanklin Theatre, which was great fun and rather more professional than I was expecting. One of the children wanted to leave after eight seconds, but I talked her round with reassuring words and Haribo until she started to enjoy it.
• a fun-filled and fairly sunny trip to Tapnell Farm Park. It was remarkably busy for a January day, but we got our money’s worth and then went to Freshwater Bay to watch the cold blooded surfers who had presumably bunked off work as soon as they’d seen that the surf was up, dude.
• an evening outing to some impressive fireworks at Sandown Pier, which included such highlights as child one needing the toilet just as the fireworks began and child two going green in the car on the way home.
• the Isle of Wight Steam Railway’s New Year’s Day Hangover Train Ride. I would suggest that a lie-in and greasy breakfast might be a better solution for grown ups, but plenty of families with young children turned up for a trip on the steam train. There was also a Winter Wonderland at the Steam Railway which consisted of a model railway intensely decorated with Christmassy models. We enjoyed this bit greatly and would have spent at least an hour longer in there if there had been a ‘spotter sheet’ or something similar.
• an attempt at sandcastle building at Woodside Bay, despite it not being a very sandy beach. Having the beach so close was a real bonus.

There were also plenty of other wintery things which we didn’t do, including the cinema, swimming pools, several animal attractions and so on. On one occasion we had a close up view of one of the Isle of Wight’s famous red squirrels whilst at Woodside Coastal Retreat, although I’m not sure I can count that as an attraction.

There are certainly downsides to a winter holiday on the Isle of Wight – the coldness, the dark evenings which mean you can’t admire the view whilst you eat dinner in a seaside restaurant and so on. But there are also plus sides, including considerably cheaper accommodation, cheaper ferries, quieter roads and some free on-street parking. If you’re a dog owner (which I’m not) then you’ve also got the advantage of being able to walk on all the beaches which you can’t do in summer.

We were pretty lucky with the weather. It only rained for half an hour all week and we had a few minutes of sunshine here and there. Most of the time it was greyer than the Manchester United away kit of 1996 but it wasn’t quite as cold as I expected.

It was certainly better than trying to fill three weeks watching CBeebies.