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The Eskimos have 50 words for snow. They are deeply interested in snow. Snow matters to an Eskimo.  One word will describe how the snow is falling, softly, hesitantly; another tells you if it is good for sledging over.

They have one word that describes snow that is filled with holes, (like swiss cheese, though less edible). 

The Siberian Russians care passionately about Reindeer. They have 180 different words that tell you everything you need to know about a reindeer and even its personality. 

One describes a female reindeer with strong opinions, and is hard to handle; then there is word for the bull reindeer with just one testicle.

Of course it rather depends on how you count words and suffixes, but some linguists claim that English is the richest language in the world with a vocabulary of 500,000 words compared to German’s 135,000, and  French having less than 100,000.

This came about partly because English is a composite of German, French and Latin.  In which case, as we celebrate St Valentine’s day, how is it that we have only one word for love?

What is even more odd is the way that Valentines’ day, with its celebration of romantic and erotic love (two qualifying words immediately required), is linked to an Italian Christian bishop who lived in central Italy, cared for the poor (another kind of love), and was executed for the love of Jesus (and another) on February 14th, 249 A.D.

So here we have at least four different kinds of love joined together in association with a mysterious Italian martyr about whom little else is known.

There seems to have been some kind of connection with him celebrating marriages in the Roman Empire. In Roman law, Ifyou had recently married, you became exempt for a while from military service. So Valentine may have been the go-to man if you were looking to combine avoiding fighting Teutonic warriors in damp northern European forests with committing to your best woman for life.

How did the martyr bishop famous for his marriage celebrations morph into the symbol of celebration of falling in love with your ideal and idealised ‘other’? It seems it was Chaucer who helped the story along.

However it happened, so far so good. But the prominence we place on romantic love on St Valentine’s day leaves us with two problems. The first is how you stay in love when infatuation begins to fade.  And the second  is how we celebrate and give more emphasis to the many different kinds of love we are capable of as adult human beings?

A problem with romantic love is that it is time limited. After three years (or so) it needs to grow into something different and deeper, or else it fades and jades. 

Love develops new forms and matures, and does so particularly through creating children and families. 

There is the love as a parent and between parents, and then grandparents, different again  After erotic, romantic love has left us so crazily infatuated with each, a new kind of love emerges, marital; it’s a bit less erotic and romantic, but just as fierce, deep and protective. But now it is focussed on the protection and nurture of children. And when the children have grown, the discovery that something even deeper has happened over the years of struggle and trust. It becomes another kind of love.

Louis de Bernieres describes it well in Captain Corelli’s Mandolin:

“That is just being “in love” which any fool can do.

Love itself is what is left over when ‘being in love’ has burned away,

And this is both an art and a fortunate accident.

Those that truly love, have roots that grow towards each other underground,

And when all the pretty blossom have fallen from their branches,

They find that they are one tree and not two.”

We have been badly served by Hollywood and pop songs. Our film culture concentrates on the first romantic hit. There is no development. Happy ever after is assumed, even though we know it is unlikely. 

There are few models for this slow entwining love. Our culture has imposed a filter of sexualisation. ‘If it isn’t sexual, it isn’t love.’ Little to help us understand the gradual shift of tectonic plates together after the first earthquake; or the slow warming after the first fireworks. 

There are other loves we can’t find in our dictionary, for which we don’t have other words, (with the single exception of charity usually prefaced by ‘I don’t want’); the love for the stranger, the love of the vulnerable, the compassion for the crushed, the love given freely without expecting anything in return.

For the religious and spiritual there is the gratitude for the gift of life, and the experience of forgiveness; the promise of knowing as we are known.

If we treasure love more than the Eskimos care about snow, or the Siberians value reindeer, we need a wider lexicon of love, and perhaps even a wider selection of greeting cards in memory of St Valentine, whose life stood for so many more kinds of love than we recognise. Happy Valentine’s Day!

There was something truly shocking about the police leaking the news of their raid on Cliff Richard’s house to the BBC, who then made sure a helicopter was in the sky filming their break in. The presumption of innocenceuntil proved guilty beyond reasonable doubt is such an important part of our culture. It is a key element in protecting the individual and the standards of public truth.

 It protects me; it protects you; it was supposed to protect Cliff Richard. He wrote 

 “I fear I will forever be tainted by the lurid and intrusive coverage I received. I have had to bring civil proceedings to obtain redress for these appalling invasions of my privacy by the police and the BBC. But that can never undo all the damage I have suffered. It would have been so much better never to have been in this position at all.”

 He wasn’t the only one to suffer from theirresponsibility of people who didn’t understand how important the principle was. 

 It happened also, to Lord Britten, who was alive at the time, and posthumously to Edward Heath. There is a justification, but it is a dangerous one. The reason is that by publicising an arrest evidence can be gathered to convict criminals. I’m sure that is true. But it is also an insidious example of the dangerous idea that ‘the end justify the means’.

 This idea was associated most famously with Machiavelli who was notorious for putting ‘power before principle’. At a minor level, people use the idea to justify lying on their CV to get a job; at a major level, it led to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. 

 Of all the places and the people who should understand the need for the presumption of innocence and that ‘the end never justifies the means’, the Church should top the list. Sadly, when it came to the reputation of the saintly bishop of Chichester George Bell, the Archbishop of Canterbury sided with Machiavelli.

 It was deeply distressing that an elderly woman (Carol) should have suffered from such disturbing memories of abuse from her childhood. It was quite right that she should be taken seriously and listened to with dignity and attention. But the memories didn’t make it clear who the man abused her was, (she thought it might be Bishop Bell) and all the psychiatric evidence is that memories, however we cherish them or are even disturbed by them, are not as reliable as we think they are.

 On the basis of this allegation they destroyed Bell’s reputation in public.

 The strategy was partly justified in order to see if there were any other allegations out there, and partly, tragically, because it hoped that by sacrificing George Bell it might make up for the Church’s appalling record of failing to take sexual abuse seriously.

 As a result widespread protest against this, Lord Carlile was asked to examine the process by which the Church evaluated the evidence. He came to the conclusion that it was both flawed and seriously incompetent. He also appeared to want to exonerate Bishop Bell completely but was restrained by his terms of reference

 That was when the ‘safeguarding’ response moved from incompetence to something much worse. 

 On being exposed in this way the Church safeguarding authorities started to insist that there were other allegations which justified their judgement. But when they were challenged as towhat weight they might have, they refused to say what they were. Eventually, again after widespread protest, another investigation was commissioned to see what they were, this time by Timothy Briden. He has just published his report.

 It turns out that none of them stood up to a moment’s scrutiny. The most dramatic, which was as so often, hearsay, came from a man who said hismother, a cleaner in the Palace once told him she had answered the phone and gone looking for Bishop Bell, only to find him engaged in energetic sex with another man in the garage over the bonnet of his Rolls Royce. It turned out that cleaners never answered the phones, Bell didn’t own a Rolls Royce, would not have frequented the garage and had been dead 20 years at the alleged date. So the accuser arbitrarily changed the date to another one – at which point Bell was elderly, in poor health and had trouble walking let alone what he was being accused of.

 Another allegation came from a reporter who had written in a local paper that she had interviewed a psychiatric nurse who claimed she had been abused by Bell as a child. Both Lord Carlile and Timothy Briden tried to find the reporter and the nurse. Both had disappeared and couldn’t be found.

 And so it went on.

 Finally the Archbishop has been forced, by the facts, to give a kind of apology. But he couldn’t bring himself to lift entirely the cloud of suspicion he and his colleagues has poisoned poor George Bell’s reputation with. What was offered was a ‘qualified apology’. The Bible however is stuffed with advice about the sanctity of the reputation and the sin of bearing false witness. 

 Perhaps both he and the safeguarding officials might bear in mind that safeguarding cuts both ways. The presumption of innocence is itself a safeguarding as well as a moral principle. Machiavelli is as dangerous as he is alluring, and that applies to bishops and anyone else in public office as much as it does to politicians.