Perpetual Calendar

Twenty eight days has September

Beryl, June and November

All the rest have 28

Every 28 years we do December twice

Which puts the Equinox right and because holidays are nice

Every month should look like below. Thirteen months with 28 days in each and a new month called Beryl which will be the first month of the year. This gives us a year with 364 days.

Mon 1	Tue 2	Wed 3	Thu 4	Fri 5	Sat 6	Sun 7
Mon 8	Tue 9	Wed 10	Thu 11	Fri 12	Sat 13	Sun 14
Mon 15	Tue 16	Wed 17	Thu 18	Fri 19	Sat 20	Sun 21
Mon 22	Tue 23	Wed 24	Thu 25	Fri 26	Sat 27	Sun 28

After thinking about this in the small hours I finally looked into it and, like any good idea, I didn’t come up with it. The proposal has been called other things: The Eastman plan or Rolling Calendar to name two. But I don’t like the way these others go about it. They have floating, unnamed days in every year and there appears to be forelock tugging in religion’s direction. Now, if the idea is so simple I can think of it on my own... it’s worth looking at.

Here are some of the selling points of my plan, along with challenges that’ll have to be surmounted and hopefully turned into winners.

Selling Points:

ü  You can actually learn by heart the dates for the rest of time

ü  If you don’t want to do it that way, only learn the first week (or the first set of Sundays which correspond to your seven-times-tables anyway) and count on your fingers from there

ü  No more monthly variations that fool cheap watches and anyone who can’t learn the poem... or do that thing with their knuckles... which for the record, is harder than learning the poem. (There’s the “are the dips in the knuckles intuitive or counter-intuitive?” moment)

ü  No more Friday the Thirteenth

ü  Being “at sixes and sevens” will develop the spicy connotation of being away for a dirty weekend

ü  Monthly meetings can be defined with a number, rather than “last Tuesday of every month except February this year...” guff

ü  Forget leap years and all that rubbish. Every 28 years we do December again. That’s so irregular many will never live to see it, even more won’t get to see it twice and you’ve ample time to book the second holiday if you think you are going to be here. You can also re-gift all the First Christmas presents you didn’t like for Second Christmas before they get dust on them

ü  Think of all the formatting in reports, calendar pages and all sorts of extraneous activity we’ll be able to do away with if the month is a standard length

Cripertunities:

X     Everybody who had a birthday on the 29^th, 30^th and 31^st of anything will have it moved to a date that is equal to the number of days from the first day of the year. For example: September the 29^th is day 272. This puts it at September the 20^th once you’ve counted through Beryl as the first month. Cheap parents can pretend the birthday went missing altogether

X     Some will complain that it doesn’t relate as closely to what they are used to with traditional farming. In the long run, who cares? They are a small proportion of the population and most of us neither know nor care where the moon is, when the harvest should come in and when the Fall of Nineveh should be celebrated

X     Some will complain that it will mess with their Zodiac sign. Ignore them, they are pinheads. In fact, Pinhead can be the thirteenth sign. If they persist tell them it makes no difference as the Gregorian Calendar had nothing to do with sidereal time to start with. The stars have moved in the heavens well out of where the original zodiac would have them anyway so anyone who protests in the street about it can be safely herded into the sea

X     All the crazy arguments you hear around daylight saving will rear their heads with renewed vigour. Again, who cares? We already cope with those who can’t deal with the change of the clocks. What difference will it really make? Besides, a good proportion of the clocks around us now get auto-adjusted and it’s not like that’s going to decrease

X     Calculating Easter in relation to the moon as though that is important and relevant to an already badly mangled myth is madness and should be dispensed with. Just set and forget

X     Some will complain that the slide towards the leap-month every 28 years will mean the seasons will shift too much across the year. I would politely suggest that I haven’t been able to make sense of the weather for quite some time now: what’s a day-a-year shift going to do?

X     If it’s a fashion industry concern with the above, the industry doesn’t appear to have any discernable grounding in reality anyway, so why worry about the little things

So there you have it. A plan that makes sense and one I need to get off to the bosses by the Numpteenth of Cocktinember at the latest.