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Poorly googled factsheet – Valentine's day

And so it comes around again, bearing down upon us like a giant pink teddy bear clutching to his fuzzy chest a silk heart, elegantly embroidered with 'I wuv you' .

That's right, it's Valentine's day. As if you could have missed it.

Valentine's day is a day to celebrate the life of St Valentine, the patron saint of young love, chocolate factories and massacres.

Valentine spent his early days at the specialist technology college and training school in Ilford, Essex that is named after him today, but eventually took to Christianity in a big way,

At this time, it was illegal for younger people to get married, but Valentine had other ideas. He happily conducted weddings for anyone who fancied it, making him the equivalent of a medieval Las Vegas.

Eventually, this subversive activity got out and Valentine was arrested and due to be beheaded. However, whilst in prison, it is said he fell in love with the jailer's daughter.

One evening he allegedly handed the lucky lady a note reading 'from your Valentine'. In this, he promised to love her for the rest of his life, a promise he was confident of keeping as he was due to be executed the following day.

It was that day, in fact, that the saint first got the nickname 'My Bloody Valentine'.

Thus began the day's connection with love and romance – and what says 'true love' quite like a disembodied skull in a glass box? You can see St Valentine's in the Basilica of Santa Maria in Rome, perhaps after taking in a romantic meal for two and before watching the moon rise over the Coliseum.

So close is the association of the Valentine name with romance, that popular film star Rudolph Valentino, adopted the name. This was partly to sound more like a film star, partly to emphasise his appeal to the ladies, and partly because there wasn't enough room in the credits to put Rodolfo Alfonzo Raffaello Pierre Filibert Guglielmi.

And the name certainly did the job, Valentino spent many years as one of the most famous men in the world, loved by women everywhere, before he finally retired to pursue an even more successful career as a reindeer.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the world the Valentine's festival just kept getting more and more popular.

Every year on this day, women buy their loving husbands and boyfriends thoughtful tokens of their love, men get some chocolates on the way home from the pub and offices all over the land fill up with large bunches of flowers and colleague resentment in equal measure.

But the real winners on Valentine's day are, of course, stalkers. All over the nation they rejoice as sending an anonymous note to someone you really, really love is, for one day only, considered a good thing.

So to all you young lovers out there, we at PoorlyGoogled wish you all a very happy Valentine's day.

posted by Peter The Great @ 5:40 PM