St Valentine used love to fight Roman emperor

HAPPY Valentine’s Day to all our readers. I hope that those who have loved ones take the time to tell them they are loved. I believe that’s the whole point of Valentine’s Day. We stagger through life trying to cope with all the problems and worries that are thrown at us, and often forget we have people around us who love us and who are loved by us, but it’s too easy to take them for granted.

If you find it too embarrassing to say “I love You” out loud to somebody, it just shows you’re horribly out of practice.

Saint Valentine is officially the patron saint of “courtly love”.

The interesting thing about this is that there are several contenders for the title.

Nobody seems 100% sure exactly who he was and why he was a saint.

The generally accepted version is that he was a priest – or maybe even a bishop – in Rome in the first or second century AD.

The story I like to believe (because I love a good story) is that he provoked the anger of Emperor Claudius, who was trying to conscript young men into his army. The law was that any young unmarried male over a certain age was eligible for army duty.

St Valentine is said to have performed secret marriages for young Christian couples, so the husbands wouldn’t have to go off to war.

Naturally this p ***** -off Claudius, who had Valentine tossed into prison and condemned to death.

The story goes that the prison warder who was in charge of Valentine had a young daughter who was blind.

Valentine heard of this and prayed for her and she was cured of her blindness. Claudius was unimpressed and said unless Valentine renounced his faith he would be beaten to death and beheaded.

Obviously Valentine refused to comply (or he wouldn’t have ended up a saint).

On the morning of his execution he wrote a letter to the jailer’s daughter and signed it: “Your Valentine”. I guess you could say that was the first Valentine card. He was executed outside the Flaminian Gate in Rome on February 14, 269.

Well, that’s one story and unless a better one comes along I’ll go along with it.

I think it’s an important point of the story that Valentine and the blind girl were not “lovers” in the modern sense of the word, although it goes without saying she ended up loving him. He must have been a man filled with love if he took the time – just hours before he was to be cruelly killed – to write a kind letter to a young girl.

Last Laugh

Jim was a quiet farmer who was married to Rosy for 50 years. They never had children and his friend Bob once asked him whether they had ever tried to have kids.

“Well,” said Jim, “It’s like this: Many years ago, before we were married, we were sitting together in the moonlight one evening and I was feeling very romantic and made a certain suggestion to Rosy. She was so indignant about it that I just never dared mention the matter again.”