As I made my way back from the posh shops last night I passed other men with champagne and cards in their trollies working out how to treat their wives and lovers with the “love” that was expected of them. This is the love that is engineered by those who make their money out of the  media exploitation of a saints day.

St Valentine’s Day when prices go up in the ether of love

The prizes of Valentine’s Day are all won by those who engineer this exploitation of a genuine human emotion into a financial package.

My house does not have Valentine’s cards for my wife. I have decided to go the digital way and spare the postman and paper massacred  trees.

My partner of a quarter of a century has got a digital card from an anonymous source and this is the confirmation I got early this morning.

It is the last and most absurd derivation of what Saint Valentine engendered many centuries ago. Make your way past pages of adverts for Valentine gifts and you come to Wiki

Valentine’s Day, also called Saint Valentine’s Day or the Feast of Saint Valentine,^[1] is celebrated annually on February 14, It originated as a Christian feast day honoring a martyr named Valentine, and through later folk traditions it has also become a significant cultural, religious and commercial celebration of romance, commitment, and love in many regions of the world.

But thought there have been religious connections, the exploitation of St Valentine has been regular. Winchester made money out of a preserved head of St Valentine was a source of revenue for a Hampshire town well known to the pension actuary.

A relic claimed to be Saint Valentine of Terni’s head was preserved in the abbey of New Minster, Winchester, and venerated

But the history of Valentine is one of horror, persecution and of love persisting even when lives are terminated through violence. Even the heart that we think a sign of emotion may have been a sign of immanent death

According to legend, in order “to remind these men of their vows and God’s love, Saint Valentine is said to have cut hearts from parchment”, giving them to these soldiers and persecuted Christians, a possible origin of the widespread use of hearts on Saint Valentine’s Day

But for me as a student of English Literature, Valentine’s Day is the day when birds find each other and set in train the births of little birds later in the spring and this story of the Parliament of Fowles is unique in all that I can find on Valentine’s origins in being linked neither with commerce or horror

So my Valentine’s Day will be spent with my love by the river Thames with the sparrows, and tits and ducks and geese and swans and a pair of woodpeckers , green parrots and I hope a kingfisher. There will be pigeons and we hope no sparrow hawk (terrorising the starlings).

It will be our parliament of fowls and it will not be sponsored in any way, just like this blog. It will just be generated by love of life and on February 14th , a looking forward to great things in March and the end of winter. For many down south, who have not had a dry day since Christmas, it is a reminder that spring is nearly hear and summer after that.