MAYBE it’s an age thing, but over the Christmas and New Year break I became addicted to tear-jerkers – you know, The Sound of Music, Dirty Dancing and, for me at least, that real ice breaker, The Horse Whisperer (in fact, I only saw the last 50 minutes of it, but I was hooked).

Sure, I had a few glasses of wine beforehand, but that’s really no excuse. I mean, I was stone cold sober when I started watching Julie Andrews pirouette on top of that mountain and that didn’t deter me. In fact, I stuck with it right to the end. Even cheered.

Same with Dirty Dancing. I mean, what a great guy Johnny Castle (Patrick Swayze) was – and how misunderstood.

Of course, since then, my condition hasn’t been helped by all those Hallmark films they screen in the afternoons (I’m guessing, but I think Hallmark is also the card manufacturer, one and the same, and that would make sense).

After all, they’re cheesy and predictable. For example: widowed dad can’t communicate with kids and fails to notice attentions of district nurse – orphaned at birth – who teaches him how to love again.

Yes, snigger if you will, I would have three weeks ago but clearly something’s snapped in me. Pressure at work maybe, dandruff – still – after 30 years. Who can tell?

All I know is, I now weep at these things. And worse still, it’s not like I’m complaining either. It’s alien to me, yes, but not unpleasant. It just takes a bit of getting used to.

However, I’m concerned things may be getting out of hand.

In the last week alone, for instance, I’ve become more and more obsessed with trying to get hold of a copy of The Horse Whisperer, by Nicholas Evans.

I’ve tried all the usual suspects, Waterstone’s, Blackwell’s and that discount bookshop in the Westgate Centre, but to no avail. And that’s infuriating, because I desperately want to find out what happens (if anything?) to the Robert Redford character. And Kristin Scott Thomas’s too.

Want to know why? Because I’m suffering withdrawal symptoms. A kind of Mills & Boon cold turkey. I so ‘fell’ for those characters, I now can’t accept they’re out of my life.

Interestingly, I was hoping that when I got back to work, maybe the feeling would wear off, like alcohol or cheap mouthwash. But it hasn’t.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not starting to stare all doe-eyed at the woman who sells me my breakfast croissant or bleach in Tesco, but I reckon I could go that way.

It’s just these kind of stories seem so genuinely comforting. The ‘hero’ is always a loner, in an appealing kind of way, and their life is always empty and meaningless.

Then, without warning, someone walks into their lives – sometimes with a limp from a surgical malpractice, sometimes with a past that won’t stop haunting them – and the two become one.

It’s great. And so true to life.

Love, I’m learning, makes the world go round, but especially so if it’s painful, tinged with shame and stuffed full of secrets.

Next stop Barbara Cartland, I reckon.