A non-shopping day: I would celebrate that

My cynicism about Valentine's Day is ancient and gnarled. It's not that I'm against celebratory days, not at all. We need more. It's just that this has become another in the endless series of cynical marketing fiestas that stud the year. It compares with Easter (festival of chocolate), Father's Day and Mother's Day (both devoted to the greeting card industry, with walk-on parts for golfing sweater manufacturers, gin distillers and market gardeners in the flower racket), Christmas (everything that can be bought and sold) and the new, wholly unabashed shopping festivals known as The Sales.

Oh yes, we do our duty, which is to trudge yet again to the shops, in this case for vile raspberry-coloured champagne, heart-shaped confectionary and so forth. But since shopping is what the country spends most of its time doing anyway, there is nothing special, or out of the ordinary, about it.

Wouldn't it be better to have new festivals that have nothing to do with buying things? There could be one day a year devoted to making up ancient quarrels - in person. That would be exciting. It would be full of high emotion, attempts at reconciliation going hopelessly wrong and confused debates about who was at fault, as if the country were suddenly dripping with real-life short stories.

Or, in this age of hyperactivity and stress, what about a day in which we all tried to stay in bed from dawn to dusk, doing absolutely nothing beyond a little gentle musing?

And I've always loved the idea of the Saturnalia, when roles were reversed. What about a topsy-turvy day, when city tycoons march out to man the Coles checkouts, parents are forced to obey their children, and the boy from Liverpool with the most Asbos becomes Home Secretary for 24 hours? There we go: Sorry Day, Snoozefest and Somersault Day.