History of Valentine's Day, Valentine's Week and other romantic business opportunities ...

If you aren’t giving or receiving a teddy bear today then either the ardour has died, in you or your partner, or you’ve decided that the cost of love isn’t measured in diamond rings and all these things, like fluffy toys, sticky confectionery and the wounds from prickly flowers.

It used to be that there was Valentine’s Day, when you scrawled a few lines of doggerel on an unsigned Hallmark card. Now there’s an expensive, week-long countdown to the event, in gift-giving and pledges, which rather defeats the idea that your troth should be expressed anonymously.

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So, you’ll have had your Rose Day, or not, bought the ring and gone down on the knee (not advised if you are a black US quarterback) on Propose Day, gorged on chocolates on Guess-What Day yesterday (unless you preferred National Pizza Day), got your furry friend for Teddy Day today, prepared a pledge (that you can keep) for Promise Day tomorrow, with Hug Day and Kiss Day still to come before the big V-Day itself.

If you’re on your own, there’s no need to feel ignored. You can look forward to the day after, the singles awareness one, which involves giving gifts – to yourself, of course.

There is not a day or an event in the year which some group or vested interest hasn’t snared. Today it’s the Baftas, the Children of Alcoholics Week continues, as does Student Volunteering Week. On Tuesday, it’s Darwin Day, then we go into Galentine’s Day, where women celebrate women, World Radio Day, and Imagine, the world’s largest children’s festival, all before the big day dawns.

We may know where we are, and can predict where this is all going – more days commemorating hitherto unnoticed or invented trifles – but how did it all come about, this Valentine’s Day, and who is to blame?

The legend begins in 278 AD in Rome, when the emperor Claudius II beheaded two (or was it three?) men named Valentine, who sent love notes from their cells, or chopping blocks, on February 14. As Claudius died in a town in modern-day Serbia, and some eight years before the event, this account is questionable.

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It’s more likely that the emerging Christian church concocted the whole thing to wean pagan punters away from the following day’s Lupercalia (the day which nowadays is reserved for singles). This was an altogether more jolly and rumbustious event.

It commemorated the goddess Februata Juno, and it seemed to involve two toffs stripping naked, sacrificing a goat and a dog (just because they could?), dipping the goat hide in sacrificial blood and wandering round the streets “blessing” young women by swiping them with it (nowadays there’s Tinder to swipe).

It’s said women of the time actually lined up to be “blessed” and it was seen to be, er, cutting-edge drama, although this is not recommended today, unless you have some recidivistic streak, because you will surely end the celebrations in a cell.

After the slapping ritual, comely young women put their names in a large urn and randy young men would pick out one and off they would go to vigorously further the Roman Empire. Think a medieval Naked Attraction minus the contraceptive precautions.

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Today they celebrate Valentine’s Day differently throughout the world – and in some countries, like Pakistan, not at all. Blame that on someone called Abdul Waheed who, last year, successfully petitioned the high court to ban celebrations across the country and promotion of it on social media because it was un-Islamic. This happened, with immediate effect, five days before Valentine’s, on what is now Propose Day, so either he was a religious zealot or he didn’t want to fork out for the engagement ring, probably the former.

In previous years, Valentine’s Day events had been disrupted by hardline religious parties and young people were attacked, but it’s understood no goats were harmed.

In South Korea they do celebrate the day, but in a different way. Women send gifts to men they fancy, usually chocolates, and on March 14, called White Day, men reciprocate by sending a gift back of three times the value, unless the miserly have called it off in the interim, obviously. Singles don’t just have a day like here, however – the whole month of April is Black Day, theirs to mourn the lack of a partner where they eat noodles made of black bean paste.

In France, the first Valentine’s card was allegedly sent by Charles, Duke of Orleans, in 1415 when he was a guest of HM in the Tower of London. Another tradition was the loterie d’amour, where men and women who fancied each other could simply pair off. Men who weren’t satisfied with their match could leave for another – you see this in many a French film – and the spurned women then gathered together to burn pictures of the men who had wronged them, a sort of bonfire of the vanities.

In Ghana, February 14 is celebrated as National Chocolate Day, an event created by the government to boost tourism to the country, given Ghana is the second-largest cocoa producing country in the world. They are a bit more kind to goats there too. They have a saying: “However high you lift the kid goat, you place if gently on the ground.” I’m sure it makes sense to a Ghanaian.

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In Denmark, Valentine’s Day is a fairly new festival and involves the usual chocolates and gifts, but also handmade cards with penned verses and pressed white flowers called snowdrops.

In the US, of course, they do it larger and more expensively, although there have been breaks in tradition, like 1929, when Al Capone’s South Side gang mowed down seven North Siders in Chicago, although they missed their prime target, gang leader Bugs Moran.

Of course, you can avoid the whole, contrived expensive business that is Valentine’s Day quite simply, by being unlovable. Works for me.