The origins of St Valentine's Day, as we know, can be traced to the ancient Roman rituals of Lupercalia. These were held each year on February 15th near the Lupercal, the cave in Rome in which the abandoned infant founders of the city, Romulus and Remus, were said to have been suckled by a she-wolf.
The festivities involved the sacrifice of animals to appropriate gods, after which two young athletes, smeared with the sacrificial blood, would race through the Roman streets with strips of goats' hide in their hands. It was thought that any women who placed themselves in the path of these gory youths, so as to receive gentle blows from the goats' hide, were guaranteed fertility.
Shakespeare has the young Mark Anthony take part in such a race in Julius Caesar, before which the doomed dictator says:
Forget not in your speed, Antonius,
To touch Calpurnia; for all our elders say,
The barren touched in this holy chase
Shake off their sterile curse.
With the coming of Christianity, festivities with Lupercalian connections continued to be held around this time of year and became associated with St Valentine's feast day. In medieval times, however, they acquired more romantic connotations, and shrewd observers of the natural world found in it a justification for their ardour. As Robert Herrick has it:
Oft have I heard both youths and virgins say,
Birds choose their mates, and couple too, today. But here is a strange thing. Amorous passions, as we well know, are associated with heat, or as Byron rather nicely puts it:
What men call gallantry, and gods adultery,
Is much more common where the climate's sultry.
Yet if you examine the temperature records for Dublin for the 30-year period from 1961 to 1990, and calculate the average temperature for each individual winter date, you get the very interesting result that the coldest day of the year, on average, is today, St Valentine's Day.
Alexander Buchan reached a similar conclusion. Buchan, you may remember, was the Scotsman who made a detailed study of the weather in the 1860s, and found that certain periods of the year were statistically colder or warmer than their position in the calendar would suggest they ought to be - periods which became widely known as "Buchan spells". He identified three "warm spells" and six cold ones, the first of the latter being the period from February 7th to 14th, the week leading up to St Valentine's Day.
But then, as we have seen this year, neither Buchan nor the Irish climate always gets it right. And perhaps Lord Byron was mistaken too.