Claudine Beaumont looks at the best links for lovers
　　Eat out
　　It is not too late to book a table for two for February 14. This site offers information on late availability and enables you to search by town for restaurants throughout the UK. On the other hand, the article about romantic dining warns that 90 per cent of us still feel that overt displays of affection are out of place at the dinner table. Perhaps staying in might be a better idea.
　　Eat in
　　Auntie Beeb comes over all sensible with advice about not being too ambitious, as well as offering interesting menus for a romantic meal (click "News and events"). There is also a link to a science article about love, which explains that when we are smitten, events occur in the brain that are akin to mental illness. Perhaps best not mention that to your beloved…
　　Chocolates
　　Mmm, yum. A gift from this delightful shop, which has hundreds of delicious chocolates to choose from, is sure to endear you to the object of your affections. However, you probably have to know someone pretty well before you give them a Mellow Love Slab, even if it does contain real cherries.
　　Cut flowers
　　Ten traditional red roses are £19.50, but what really distinguishes Imogen's superior flowers-by-post collection is the option to show you care about the rest of the world, and not just the one you love, by choosing Fairtrade flowers.
　　Growing flowers
　　Mature plants, ready to go in the garden - surely more of a statement than an ephemeral bouquet? Ideas for Valentine plants include an iris called Smitten Kitten and a camellia named Desire.
　　Gifts
　　Staying with plants, and getting as far as possible away from tacky heart-shaped plastic things, SandEdge offers garden-related gifts, the most romantic of which is a tomato plant. Tomatoes were once called "love apples" - and these, though small, are extra-sweet.
　　Messages in the sand
　　Here's a lovely thought: a message to your beloved written in the sand on a beach. But perhaps, rather than paying for someone else to write it, you could wait for a decent bright day between now and Thursday, take an impromptu morning off work, pop to your nearest bit of coastline (no part of Britain is more than 70 miles from the sea) with a digital camera and do it yourself.
　　Most romantic films
　　Back in 2004, we published a list of the 30 most romantic films ever. Reading about such splendid lines as Katharine Hepburn's husky, just-kissed request to James Stewart, "Put me in your pocket, Mike", should be enough to get you in the mood for an evening in with your special one and a DVD player.
　　Love poems
　　There are so many terrible clichés in love poetry that it is a relief to be able to find some fresh new thoughts on this excellent contemporary poetry site, which also has audio files of readings of the poems. Use the "browse by theme" feature to search for love poems. Alternatively, stick with tradition and try Robbie Burns's A Red, Red Rose at robertburns.org.
　　Saint Valentine
　　It has to be said that Saint Valentine is almost certainly mythical and that, if he ever did exist, nothing at all is known about him. That aside, it could be claimed that the British Isles are the most romantic place in the world, since three churches here claim to have relics of the saint: Whitefriar Street Church in Dublin (on the Carmelite website, click "Saint Valentine"), the Birmingham Oratory (www.birmingham-oratory.org.uk and click "The church" then "S. Athanasius") and a church in Glasgow (which has no website).