Valentine's Day or 14 February

I don't celebrate Valentine's Day because it is a sheer coincidence that my fiance and I got together on the 14 February. We were both single at the time and didn't give a flying fart so we just never thought about the actual date until a few days later.

For many people Valentine's Day is a day of hell. They are either single and feel worse for seeing all the lovey dovey rubbish going on around them, have to work because they do something like waiting tables and have to see all the other couples when their loved one is at home, or they forget and their partner goes batshit crazy on them.

Here are some facts about the day:

Saint Valentine was a Roman saint and it has only been a day of love since the Middle Ages. There are actually around 11 other saints with the name Valentine who have saints days on different dates. There may even have been more than one Valentine who died on 14 February. It is actually impossible to say for sure who he was and what he did. Really we have to go on the Middle Ages and their beliefs because when it comes to the saint himself we know absolutely nothing. There is nothing contemporary surviving anyway. The stories say that he helped soldiers to marry in secret and so became the saint of love but again, these are mere speculation and we don't know for sure.

Here are some things we do know about the 14 February though:

• Richard II died in 1400 on the orders of Henry of Bollingbrooke (who became Henry IV).
• 1778 saw the US flag recognised by a foreign navy vessel for the first time.
• In 1852 Great Ormond Street Hospital for children first opened in London.
• Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray both submitted a patent for the telephone on 14 Feb 1876.
• The Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company changed its name to International Business Machines, or IBM, in 1924.
• 1929 saw the St Valentine's Day Massacre in Chicago where several members of the rival gang to Al Capone were killed.
• 1990 Voyager One takes a photo of Earth which would later be called the 'Pale Blue Dot'.
• YouTube was launched by college students in 2005.

Some notable people were born on this date:

• Lois Maxwell - best known as the original Miss Moneypenny in the Bond films (1927)
• Teller - as in the magician duo Penn and Teller (1948)
• Simon Pegg - comedian, actor, writer and director who is best known for films like Shaun of the Dead and is currently working on the new Star Trek film (1970)
• Uggie - the dog from the excellent film The Artist (2002)

There are other people who have died on this date besides Saint Valentine too:

• James Cook the English explorer (1779)
• John Henson - American puppeteer and brother of Brian Henson who founded the Muppets (2014)

For a full list of these things you can see the wikipedia entry at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_14

Anyway, the point is that you shouldn't feel bad about the day because it really is just another day. Other things have happened on that date throughout history and so you can see that life just goes on. If you don't have a partner for the day then it really doesn't matter. It is 321 days until the end of the year anyway (2016 being a leap year) so what does it all matter?