She was up for the weekend and The Boss made some uncalled-for remark about my attentiveness, suggesting that I should send her a Valentine and see if it gets me anywhere.
I suppose I should join the fun, given that around a billion Valentine’s cards are bought around the world in early February each year – it looks like they will soon outnumber Christmas Cards, which are falling out of favour.
It all started with the ancient Roman festival of Lupercalia, which involved young men running through the streets in mid-February wearing goatskins and playfully whipping women with strips of leather. It was meant to promote fertility but no doubt it soon got out of hand.
The name supposedly came from St Valentine, a 3 rd century Roman priest who defied Emperor Claudius II by secretly marrying young couples. The emperor had banned marriage for young men, concluding that single soldiers fought better than married ones. Valentine was trying to spare these men from war and it cost him his head. But it made him famous.
Legend has it that he sent a letter to his jailer’s daughter, signed “From your Valentine,” which is believed to be the origin of the modern Valentine’s Day card. The Boss says that sounds a stretch but I’m running with it.
History refers to another two Christian martyrs also named Valentine, but all we know is that things ended badly for the three of them.
The English poet Geoffrey Chaucer takes the credit for turning Valentine’s Day into a celebration of romantic love, when he wrote The Parliament of Fowls in 1383, a 699-line poem about birds choosing their mates on “Seynt Valentynes day”.
By the 1600s, the exchange of Valentine’s messages had become popular in England. It evolved over the next two centuries into an occasion for expressing (often secret) affection with flowers, chocolates and handwritten notes.
As you might expect, commercialisation later took off in America, when Esther Howland began mass-producing Valentines cards in the 1840s, turning it into a multi-million dollar industry.
I’m not expecting to get any nice notes from the black torpedo or anybody else – but it must be a victory of sorts when a tradition celebrating romance and affection survives a thousand years of wars, plagues, and the rise and fall of empires and nation states. There must be something in it. Woof!
