Leap Year Bonus Track

What, it's still February today? Why, of course, it's a leap year! Being born in February is reason enough to feel special, I think, but it must give a sense of true exceptionalism to be born on this most elusive day; not quite on a par with being the seventh son of a seventh son, but pretty cool, nonetheless. Put the two together, of course, and you've got the makings of an insufferable sense of entitlement. I wonder if such a person has ever existed?

It's quite odd, though, listening to earnest folk on the radio exhorting us to make the most of this "extra day". What extra day? As far as I'm aware, an extra spin of the earth has not somehow been shoehorned in, or our regular circuit around the sun – or indeed our lives – somehow magically prolonged. It's not even comparable to that glorious extra time in bed when the clocks are turned back an hour in Britain at the end of October.

More severe adjustments to the calendar do tend to play badly in people's heads. It seems surprisingly few of us are now aware of the Calendar (New Style) Act of 1750. That is, when Britain belatedly joined the rest of Europe in declaring January 1st to be the start of the year (as opposed to Lady Day, 25th March) – which resulted in a "short" year in 1751, which ran from 25th March to 31st December – followed by the "loss" of eleven days in September 1752, removed in order to bring the old Julian calendar into alignment with the new-fangled Euro-Popish Gregorian calendar. Naturally, 1752 was also a leap year, just to add to the confusion. Apparently, the so-called "calendar riots" are a myth (What do we want? Eleven days! When do we want them? Um.... Anybody got a calculator?), but I bet people were pretty discombobulated by the whole thing.

It also means that every anniversary of any event that took place before 1751 isn't actually an anniversary, technically speaking. This must have caused havoc with people's birthday arrangements in the second half of the 18th century. Being British, of course, and having ignored those Euro-Popish Gregorian calendar reforms for 170 years, many people persisted with "old style" or "O.S." dates, well into the next century. That very British expression, "that's X in old money" (where X is some more readily understandable or sympathetic alternative to Y, not necessarily a quantity) – one that you will still hear today, nearly a half-century after decimalisation and metrication – speaks to a deep-seated, small-c conservative sense that worthy and time-honoured Old Things are continually being forcibly replaced by highly-suspect New Things, purely at the whim of "them". You can read across from Reformation to Brexit fairly directly.

Talking of Old Things, I'm calling the picture above "The Horseman's Word", for reasons you will understand if you have read this old post, or share my fascination with the rural mysteries of the Old Weird Britain. Plus, of course, frogs and toads are into leaping, aren't they?