THE words flowed beautifully and seamlessly as the hour-and-a-half of poetry reading and book launch with Malcolm Guite at Sarum College last Friday flew by.

One of the many ideas which stuck with me came by way of introduction to a sonnet Guite wrote to consider why we celebrate or remember seasons and special days.

As Guite says, the truths we focus on at particular periods and days are true all the time but we don’t notice them nearly enough unless we are prompted to do so. He was speaking about the liturgical year but the principle applies to why we note any point in time at all.

Quoting Milton, Guite said it’s because we know that time is “the subtle thief”, stealing from us as we make our way fairly blindly through the daily business of living.

Special days call upon us to reflect beyond the moment – to the past, the future and, more deeply, about the present, so “time the thief” becomes “time the messenger”.

All this is a million miles away from what UK Retail Occasions reports about St Valentine’s Day, cited in an article published online, bizarrely, by British Airways.

The spending on greeting cards, flowers and chocolates appears to contradict the claim by most people surveyed that St Valentine’s Day isn’t important.

British men spent an average of £119 each in 2013 (women nearly half that), which the article attributes in no small part to panic buying.

One US survey found that 53 per cent of women will dump boyfriends who don’t buy them a present on February 14. More than half said St Valentine’s Day isn’t important at all, but one-fifth of them said they would still like to be given something.

The commercial culture is perhaps less dominant here than in the USA but we are not immune to the sort of brainwashing that feeds this contradiction, where couples are effectively blackmailed, feeling obliged to buy something.

This version of St Valentine’s Day not only doesn’t do the job of making time a messenger of romantic love but twists into becoming an even worse thief – of time, heart and wallet.

The way to avoid being robbed might just be to ignore those special displays of high-profit products, add nothing to the UK Retail Occasions figures. Saturday could be a good day for a walk, or to curl up and watch a film. Properly claiming the day costs nothing but time.