Away from the pink and red cards and bouquets of roses that decorated St Neots shops yesterday, The Gables has its own romantic beauty as a beautiful day dawns.

And St Valentine – who was he?  A quick extract from Wikipedia does not yield a great deal of information.  He was certainly a gift for post Christmas and pre Easter marketing in our age of consumerism.

“Saint Valentine (Italian: San Valentino, Latin: Valentinus), officially Saint Valentine of Terni,^[2] is a widely recognized third-century Roman saint commemorated on February 14 and since the High Middle Ages is associated with a tradition of courtly love.

All that is reliably known of the saint commemorated on February 14 is his name and that he was martyred and buried at a cemetery on the Via Flaminia close to the Ponte Milvio to the north of Rome on that day. It is uncertain whether St. Valentine is to be identified as one saint or the conflation of two saints of the same name. Several different martyrologies have been added to later hagiographies that are unreliable.”