Valentines Day- love is in the air.

Valentines Day- love is in the air.

Ladies and Gentlemen. This is your day. I give you Valentines Day, a day dedicated to love, beating, palpitating hearts, flowers, chocolates, intimate, candle lit restaurants, champagne and tender romance. Oh yes I can it see now. You've booked a table in the farthest corner of your preferred choice of restaurant and you begin to giggle at each flirtatiously because maybe this is your first date or perhaps you've just seen the most wonderful heart shaped balloons on the ceiling. Oh what a day, romance is alive and well, tenderness and passion are on first name terms and Mills and Boon books are still the best.

Now we all know about Valentines Day. For as long as anybody can remember boy meets girl across a crowded bar, a light goes on and before you can say Barbara Cartland, a thousand kisses are blown, fantasies come true, relationships are sealed over a glass of red and it all ends up with a fabulous display of teddy bears. And yet the questions persist.

 Why is the most romantic day of the year synonymous with an old massacre and why the distribution of allegedly soppy cards with equally as soppy messages? Why those endless acres of frothy messages in the national newspapers? Whose idea was it and somebody should ask them to give a decent explanation. But, say the glad hearts. it's a day of unrequited love and being nuts about each other, just smitten and besotted. There can be nothing wrong with that surely. It's love, the sweetest feeling and nobody can take that away from us.

And yet this is the very essence of Valentines Day. You know how it goes. Men all over the world will rush out of the office at the end of the day, find the nearest available florists or the florists in the most floral supermarket they can find, grab a spectacular bouquet of roses that may have set them back a second mortgage and then hold onto them tenaciously in case they get trapped helplessly in the ticket barrier.

It is perhaps the most frenetic day of the calendar but one that unites us blissfully because the feelings are so heartfelt and mutual. It is that old fashioned and timeless emotion called love. Love is that gloriously binding force. Love is that incredible feeling we get in the pit of our stomach when both girl and boy know that this is the day, this is the time and it just feels right. Love represents compatibility, understanding, compassion, adoration, sympathy when your partner is ill, sharing the good and bad times, honesty, tolerance and perhaps most importantly, compromise.

But Valentines Day is the day on which we declare our unashamed love for each other, respecting each other's wishes and looking forward to the day when, quite possibly, the bells are ringing for me and my girl. We look deeply into each other's eyes over our table for two, smile lovingly and then sigh breathlessly at the waiter because one of us may have forgotten our wallets. And that means the kitchen.

Oh no, though there's one quite important subject I may have overlooked: money. Just a minor matter and consideration perhaps. Money is the thing that raises a mortgage on a couple's first home or so they tell me. I think love though is all about sharing and caring, of being there for each other and battling through the bad times. In other words being good to each other when all seems like disaster and adversity around us. Even when the simplest words seem totally inadequate.

But Valentines Day has to be about the deepest affection and all of those affectionate endearments that seem to come naturally to us when you feel that everything is just right. Yes, I hear you cry. I know there are days when all of those essential lines of communication seem to break down and tears are shed by the bucket load. And then Eros appears at your front door, arrow poised to take flight and the reconciliation is complete because that blazing argument over the TV remote control seemed so petty.

Then there are the people who believe that love and Valentines Day means much more than whispering sweet nothings into each other and just telling your partner you're just crazy about them. It's about that mad infatuation for each other over a glass of Rose and the biggest pizza in Western civilisation. It's about running to the top of  a majestic hillside or sprinting towards each other at Paddington railway station, hair flying wildly, pulses racing and then the realisation that it doesn't get any better than this.

Love is all about the chivalry we read about in Cervantes Don Quixote, the gallantry we displayed when everything seemed to be going horribly wrong and the enduring forgiveness in our hearts was all that mattered.  In many ways Valentines Day is the one day in the year when both men and women are quite definitely on the same wavelength because the woman in your life has requested the most expensive perfume and the man just wants the quiet life.

This is the moral dilemma for men. Do they spend exorbitant amounts of money on their beloved or just slump back in the sofa and watch Sleepless in Seattle for the 352nd time? Or maybe they do act on impulse and just fly off to some perfect spot next to the Eiffel Tower? Perhaps they'd prefer to be serenaded by a gondolier on a Venetian canal. On second thoughts that sounds distinctly cheesy or who cares let's just go for it.  Or perhaps they're just whisked off to some idyllic exotic island where love and happiness hold hands by the fishing harbour and the sun dips magically behind the mountains, like an eternal burning flame. Now what happened to those weeping violins and the dancing waiter.

So there you are boys and girls, ladies and gentlemen. Valentines Day has come and gone with a flutter of hearts, love has received the ultimate endorsement from our friend in Piccadilly Circus and we can all leave the cinema with tears in our eyes because he went down on one knee and proposed and all she just wanted was the horse and glass carriage to whisk her into the sunset. Today we've spent a fortune on cards, roses, champagne and the one day of the year when two hearts are entwined, our credit cards take a severe battering and men always seem to get it in the neck for saying the wrong thing. Or maybe they do say the right thing  but phrase it incorrectly.

Love is that tingle down your spine when you know it's for real. Valentines Day is that indefinable day when the meeting of the two genders is all the confirmation you needed when the world outside was vicious and volatile. Love, as we all know. makes the world go wrong, makes your heart go pitter  patter and is, quite obviously in the air. Love has been written in song, poem and verse for as long as man and woman has trodden on earth. It has been painted and sculpted, immortalised in film and simply celebrated because Valentines Day has always done that for you.

 It is the one overriding emotion that makes us go weak at the knees, conquering the unconquerable, overwhelming and overcoming us when you just can't help saying what you've always wanted to say. Hold on it's time for men to go down on one knee and a woman to stare pathetically at their man and tell him to get up because he'll ruin those trousers. It's time to watch Sleepless in Seattle again or maybe we'll just spend a quiet night in.