We'd have gotten away with it if it wasn't for those meddling kids...

Gotta say I'm a little - as in massively - disappointed with the England squad. We've been knocked out on those pesky penalties yet again!

I do feel sorry for the players, really I do, but only to an extent. It's not easy to bear the nation's hopes on your shoulders - unless you're Andrea Pirlo, it seems - and, having missed in a previous (penalty) shootout, I applaud Steven Gerrard's courage to still step up and smash it in the net.

But the squad and the media's attitude has really gotten my dander up! I'm fed up of hearing how 'we have to draw the positives from this'. Clearly, they're not: if they were, we'd be going further in international competitions.

And oh can the pundits please stop banging on about we need a little bit of luck in these tournaments. Maybe we do, but how long did we think we were going to wing it for? Having a good strong team wins tournaments, not just having a bit of luck.

When they rattled on how about well we defended against Italy last night, they irked me. I'm not big on match tactics, but the object of the game still is to score more goals than the other team, right? Defending well, as far as I'm aware, doesn't take you through to the next stage, whereas, as I understood it, scoring goals does.

Number one gripe: if Gary Lineker is to be believed - and considering the team's track record, he can't be far wrong - it's only under Roy Hodgson that England have been practising penalties, their argument being that they can't recreate the conditions in practice. Fair enough, they can't, but surely - surely! - they should at least be trying. It's tantamount to going out based on nothing but sheer laziness.

Look at Pirlo. With that cheeky little chip he looked as if he took penalties for fun. I admit that kind of composure is superhuman, but we've also seen it from the Portuguese in the past. 

Mediterranean countries seem to know how to take penalties. What are they doing that we aren't?

Let's not put it down to all that good weather. Maybe instead of going the extra mile, they're going that extra 11 yards.

Ticket for One, Please

Just the other day I was curled up on one of Costa's mightily comfy sofas, when I overheard the group of girls next to me chatting. One of them stated that she felt less and less like getting into a relationship as she got older.

I'm sure we've all joked about being single by choice, and some people I know truly are. I always thought it was the opposite, though: that as people grow older, they're more likely to want a companion on life's journey. So the girl's comment kind of opened my eyes.

Earlier this week, I read an interesting article in a Men's Health-style magazine about how summer is the perfect time to be single:

• You can soak up the warm summer weather in a beer garden  - if we get any, of course... but this being the UK, summer was last Thursday, so if you were working that day then I'm sorry, you missed it.
• You can 'appreciate' members of the opposite sex
• You can generally relax and do as you please.      

So being single and in my early thirties, I thought I'd have a companion for life by now. But not just yet, as it turns out. 

I'm still learning to embrace being single. Now I see others who are embracing their own single status, though they probably have different reasons to my own, and I see it's not so bad. Freedom and the warm weather are taking the sting out of things. And they will do for some years, I imagine.  

So I'll keep:

• drinking lots of coffee and burying my head in books for hours at Costa
• eating lots of chocolate (there is a connection between sex and chocolate, by the way: eat too much and no one will want to have sex with you!)
• going to concerts by myself and loving it (as long as the music's good, what else do you need?)
• and doing whatever I feel like.

Then, as the temperatures start to drop, the nights pull in and we turn to winter, maybe I'll think about looking for a partner again. 

But only maybe.

Definitely maybe.  

Love is the Drug (that you might think of!)

Never mind listening to your partner's needs, going to relationship counsellors and all that jazz! Such a sensible approach to saving a relationship is too old hat in this day and age, so it would seem. 

According to experts, you may now be able to cut out the middle man or women and do it with a new 'love pill'. These magical pills would contain some of the same chemicals that our body produces during different stages or emotional states in a relationship. 

These would be, then:

• oxytocin and vasopressom - hormones that surge in our body at the start of our relationship
• pheromones - the chemicals which spark emotional response and attraction (not in a relationship right now, so I might be interested in this one!)
• testosterone - do I even need to explain this one?
• corticotrophin-releasing hormone (CRH) - this little beauty generates the fear of separation
• entactogens - create the desire for closeness and improves sociability and connection.

The odd once or twice I've come across strangers in nightclubs who, eyes bulging, and unable to sit still for more than a second, were in love with the world and everybody around them... Different kind of pill, of course. 'Eccies' or something, I think they called 'em.... !

But what if...?

What if they were to bring out such a pill legally? Would you use them, or is your relationship rock solid? Kind of funny to think that if you go through a patch in a relationship, you can have it all sorted by the time the kettle's boiled! No need for your emotions to go through the mill anymore! And you'd finally be able to turn that spare room into your Xbox room or whatever - or Narnia, as one of my relatives calls their computer room. 

And what if it was your turn to be a 'nutty professor'?

Imagine some mad fool let you loose in the scientists' lab and let you invent a pill for anything in the world. What kind of pill would you invent? Here are just a few I might want to make for myself:

• a pill that made me dance better (a man has to know how to cut some shapes!)
• a pill that allowed me to coordinate my colours easier
• a pill that allowed me to read text books in seconds and absorb every single drop
• a pill that could transport me from place to place in seconds, a bit like 'Beam me up, Scottie' but without the technology
• a pill that could make me instantly dashingly handsome. (Oh... already had that one, have we? Okay then....!)

I put it to you....

In the name of good content, those are just a few daft, minor insecurities of my own. Like Lloyd Grossman used to do on Masterchef, deliberate, cogitate and digest them. Then get back to me with your suggestions for a wonder pill. What would you like to be better at?