Special Guest Blogger: Saint Valentine

Valentine's Day celebrates the idea of love, expensive dinners and racy lingerie which is a cheap and cheerful Christian version of Lupercalia which was a pagan festival running from the 13th to the 15th of February to avert evil spirits and purify the city, releasing health and fertility by sacrificing a goat and a dog but like all things Roman, it turned into an orgy of food and sex.
Actually, thinking about it, sex is a lot like food. The less you have of it, the more you want it and once someone has put their penis into it, you're decidedly done for a while but while the Romans were running around naked and giving their womenfolk something to hang their towels on, the Christians were sat at home wondering when their new relgion was going to find a way to okay some of that sweet action.
That idea is based on the story of me, St. Valentine of Rome, a priest who married couples against the emperor's orders, because married men couldn't be drafted and therefore attempting to foil the Emperor Claudius Gothicus' plans to build an army.
That went down about as well as it sounds and he just changed the law so that married men could be drafted anyway and i was arrested and put in prison where i got chatting with the jailer who said that his daughter was blind and if i could have a word with the big guy upstairs to restore her sight, he would convert to Christianity and free me.
I placed my hands onto her eyes and her eyesight returned and with that the jailer freed me and all of the Christian inmates. I left a note for the jailers daughter and signed it Yours Valentine.
Now free i went back to banging on about God and Jesus again and i was quickly picked up again and hoping to appeal to the Emperor's better nature, attempted to convince Claudius of Christianity. Claudius became angry and sentenced me to death saying either i renounced my faith or be beaten with clubs and beheaded.
I figured that my God wouldn't allow me to be beheaded but i did think he was leaving it late when the executioner was lining up the back of my neck with his axe and on the second bounce as my head went skittering across the tiled floor i realised he wasn't saving me. True love may never die but i sure did!
Obviously i am the Patron Saint of happy marriages, love and lovers but also epilepsy and the Plague for some reason but remember me if you are planning on sipping champagne out of our partners shoes and eating oysters by candle light, but if you are single don't fret, you can always find a cup of tea with a game of bingo afterwards down at the local Catholic Church.