One might have thought that so eminent a cleric as St Valentine would have something interesting to say about the weather. But not so.
Indeed it is strange even that his feast day, so lavishly celebrated in other respects, has not become, like those of so many of his colleagues on the Calendar of Saints, associated over the centuries with portents of the coming seasons.
Valentine appears to have been completely silent on matters meteorological, and the mediaeval mind seems to have been too busy with other seasonal preoccupations at this time of year to bother much about the weather. St Valentine's Day in meteorological circles, therefore, is mainly remembered for a minor scuffle on the beach at Owyhee, or what is now Hawaii.
The explorer Capt James Cook was a quiet and conscientious man, a skilled navigator, and a perceptive scientific observer.
One of his many assignments, for example, was to time the rare transit of the planet Venus across the face of the sun in 1769, allowing astronomers, given observations from widely separated points on the globe, to calculate accurately the distance between the Earth and the sun. Cook was charged with carrying out the mid-Pacific readings at Tahiti, which he duly did.
His final voyage took place 10 years later, the objective this time being to discover the elusive Northwest Passage, a route which would join the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans around the top of North America.
Cook tackled the venture unsuccessfully from the Alaskan side, and on the return journey dropped anchor at the islands of Hawaii.
The story goes that Cook's appearance and his entourage impressed the islanders so much that they took him for the incarnation of their "Great God of the Elements" and treated him with appropriate adulation.
But when Cook set sail again, his ship was obliged to return because of stormy weather, and his cover as a god who could control the winds was blown.
Relations with the islanders deteriorated, and on St Valentine's Day, 1779, there was a skirmish. One of Cook's lieutenants noted in his journal: "Our unfortunate commander was stabbed, and fell face downwards in the water. His body was immediately dragged ashore and surrounded by the enemy who showed a savage eagerness to share in his destruction. Thus fell our great and excellent Chief!".
Cook, in his quarter of a century at sea, had experienced and survived every conceivable danger that the elements could put his way.
It was ironic that his ignominious end should be a consequence, in a bizarre way, of a relatively minor storm in the Pacific.