Newsflash! Valentine's Day was here before Card Shops!

Love it or hate it, Valentine's Day is here to stay. If love has treated you badly recently, it seems that wherever you turn on this day there are identikit smiley couples waving red roses at you, or canoodling unnecessarily amorously on the public transport system. If you feel like this then the 14th February is definitely not a day to stray near any restaurant that offers the smallest glow of candlelight! However, on the other side, Valentine's Day can also be a time for those in a relationship to make the most of each other and put some quality time into the relationship. Either way, it can be a pretty pressured time. The important thing is to remember that you've not got it as bad as old Saint Valentine who allegedly had his head chopped off by the Romans on the 14th February 270 A.D., the day that became named after him.

However, the roots of Valentine's Day go back even further than Saint Valentine. In early Roman times, as in most cultures, spring was a time of fertility rituals and festivals of the renewal of life. Mid February was seen as the start of spring (how wrong they were!) and the Lupercalia Festival came about to celebrate this and the god of agriculture. In one of the rituals of Lupercalia, Girls' names were written on pieces of paper and put in an urn and young men each had to pick out a name. Once paired off in this way, marriages would often result. If only it was that simple these days!

It is here where Saint Valentine comes into the picture, and plays his brave but unfortunate part. In fact historians believe there may have been more than one Saint Valentine. At least they didn't all meet a bloody end like the one we remember. Our Saint Valentine supposedly lived during the reign of Emperor Claudius II. Claudius was involved in a number of unpopular military campaigns and as a result men weren't too keen to join the army. The story goes that he believed men just didn't want to leave their wives and families behind. Because of this, being Emperor, he decided that the best thing to do would be to ban marriage. That way men would have nothing better to do but hack at barbarians with their swords. Despite this law from the top Saint Valentine, a priest and just plain old Valentine at this point, carried on marrying people in secret. Unfortunately the authorities found out and Valentine was hauled in front of the Prefect of Rome and sentenced to death in a particularly gruesome way. His martyrdom occurred on the 14th February, the day before the festival of Lupercalia began. This combination of events, plus the fact that he is supposed to have fallen in love with his jailer's daughter and signed off a love letter (the first Valentine's Card!) to her with the words "from your Valentine" the day of his death, has assured for him a place in history with the title "Patron Saint of lovers". Pope Gelasuis, in 496 A.D. formalised this, marking 14th February as Saint Valentine's Day in his honour and this day of romance in cold February was born.

Even if the story of Saint Valentine isn't true it is a great story. Valentine died for the cause of love! There's a lesson there perhaps, though I'm not sure what it is…or if I want to know!