Leon and Edna Koehn exchange a kiss, and
the valentine's cards they have given each
other every year since 1946.
Photograph: Bonnie Vculek/AP5pm update: It's time when those with romance on their minds are wending their way home to put the champagne on ice and the flowers in water. We've enjoyed all your contributions to this blogpost, and can now announce that the winners of the champagne are pipestar for his story about his mum getting her sixth-form class to make him valentine's cards, and kate for describing how she took her ex-boyfriend at his word when he dumped her, and married his best friend.
And here's the original blog post: If someone says the words 'Valentine's Day' to you, what springs to mind? Love, romance and bunny rabbits? Well, lucky you. Because for many of us these two words summon up pervasive feelings of exclusion, loneliness, frustration - and gangland massacres.
There's nothing wrong with the idea. That people should declare their feelings to their intended sweetheart - often for the first time, tentatively, nervously - is surely something to make even the most cynical heart flutter. But the roots of the Feast of Lupercus, the pagan celebration in which young men picked out of a hat the names of the girls they would partner for games, dancing and "other" activities, are a little more salacious.
We shouldn't need Valentine's Day as an impetus to attain the heart of our intended, and nor should this date be the only one on which we tell our beloved that they are adored. Nevertheless, it is hammered into us year after year that if we're single (or, worse luck, single and don't get any cards) on February 14, or if we fail to splash out on informing our partner of what they should know damned well already, then we've failed as human beings.
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