YOU know me – always keen to be both practical and topical. So please let me present to you, free of charge: The Middle-Aged Person’s Practical Guide To Valentine’s Day.

Firstly, allow me put my credentials on the table. This Friday will see the 27th consecutive Valentine’s Day that I have been a married man. More importantly, through all 27 I have been married to the same woman.

So if I tell you that we decided, about 20 years ago, that we wouldn’t buy each other Valentine’s Day cards any more, you can probably guess that my advice to you this week is: don’t bother.

Some partners don’t bother with Valentine’s Day because they don’t love each other any more, but we are of the other kind, who don’t buy them because we don’t feel the need to prove anything.

It is a long time since I bought one, but I still have awful memories of standing in a packed card shop, being elbowed out of the way by balding men who have possibly spent the previous 12 months taking their partners for granted, but get it into their heads that a pink card with flowers on is going to make all the difference. It won’t.

Buying cards on the eve (or even the day of) Valentine’s Day is a bit like converting to religion on your death bed. You should have thought about it earlier.

All this isn’t to say there isn’t a place for Valentine’s Day in the world.

It’s all very well if you are trying to impress your love upon somebody and you maybe can’t find the words to express it, or you haven’t known each other very long and are still caught up in courting.

In that case it’s a bit of fun and possibly even worth the extortionate price of the cards, but you really should have grown out of it when you reach my age.

Besides, there is a contradiction inherent in Valentine’s Day that has always bugged me.

The whole idea is that love and your relationship with the person you are sending the card to transcends everything else, including consumerism and materialism, but I can’t help seeing the day as being a prime example of those two deadly sins.

We just don’t go in for that sort of thing in our house, and are much more likely to decide not to buy something that’s hyped up, rather than be persuaded by it. And let’s face it: Valentine’s Day can out-hype Strictly Come Dancing.

Of course, part of my hopelessly sentimental and nostalgic brain wants to do it to carry on a tradition which, after all, goes back in its present form to the 18th century, but I have looked St Valentine up on Wikipedia and found that, technically, he didn’t exist.

Not only does he seem to be an amalgam of various saints who all went by the same name, but several of them are associated with stories of distinctly dodgy origins.

The only ratification I can really find for the romantic theme is that Valentine’s Day was once associated with the coming of spring, when we all know that a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.

But notice I say “a young man’s fancy”.

If you are not so young any more, I say forget the cards and the chocolates and the flowers, and resist the hype.

Then again, it’s easy for me to say that. Not everybody has the luxury of writing a column like this and can finish it by saying (to my wife): happy Valentine’s Day, darling.