For her 40th birthday in 1972 Richard Burton bought Elizabeth Taylor a large heart-shaped diamond known as the Taj Mahal “I would have liked to buy her the Taj-Mahal,” Burton remarked, “but it would cost too much to transport.”

But for me, the price of romance rarely equates to the value.

When I was a schoolgirl at the Convent in Stockport, one of my classmates finished with her boyfriend on February 13th (that girl had a lot to learn about dating). On Valentine’s Day as we each bragged about the number of Valentine’s cards we’d received and some of us produced one or two that had been, ahem…home produced, we looked out of the window to see fresh graffiti painted all over the Junior School wall where it was impossible for our class to miss.
‘Farewell is a lonely sound’ it read.
It was the singularly most romantic thing my classmates and I had ever seen. The girlfriend rose to Goddess-like standing in our eyes and there wasn’t a single girl in that school that wouldn’t have gladly comforted the ‘ex’.
Alas, the gesture failed to win back the heart of his fair lady and as far as I can remember, the nuns reported him to the police and he was fined.
But, as you can see, it has remained etched indelibly in my memory.

7 or 8 years ago on my way to work, I was putting petrol in the car just around the corner from the office in Middlewich and as I came back from paying, a complete stranger rushed up to me, thrust a bouquet of flowers into my hand and told me they were just because I was beautiful. Clearly this man had seen far too many adverts for cheap perfume or he may have been on drugs, I’m not sure. But suffice to say, you could have tied a piece of string to my wrist as if I was a balloon.
Shortly afterwards, as I saw him scouring the car park, presumably for my car, I had one hand on the phone ready to call the police and report a stalker. How fickle is that?!

But the romantic gesture that will forever hold pole position in my heart was when I told a guy I worked with that I liked Rudyard Kipling’s poem about Gunga Din but that I couldn’t find it anywhere. The following week he gave me a copy of Kipling’s Barrack Room Ballads, then he sat cross-legged on a table in the staff canteen and recited the entire poem to me.
This year is our 20th wedding anniversary.

What’s the most romantic thing that’s ever happened to you?