What's another year?

T-4: I see that many other media outlets are picking up on the Mayan apocalypse pencilled in for this Friday. Well, here at ODHSNM we have been on it for the whole damn year.

“What’s another year?” quoth Johnny Logan in 1980’s Eurovision winner.

Well, Johnny, a “year” is a bloody awkward rough approximation of the duration of the earth's orbit around the sun. And a proper pain in the arse it is too.

("Another year" refers to the second or subsequent instance in a series of years. And that is what another year is.)

I am attempting to plan my evil capitalist schemes for 2013 (it’s best to be prepared, in case we’re still here) and I am faced with the following absurdities:

• A year, in the Gregorian scheme, is 365 97/400 days (5 hours, 49 minutes) – that is the time between vernal equinoxes. Hence we have leap years every four years unless....eeeurgh it’s too hard, read it yourself.
• Quite independently of years, we have weeks comprised of seven days each – five of which we work and two of which we don’t.
• You do not have a whole number of weeks in year whether it’s a normal 365 day year or a leap 366 day year. Months have between 28 and 31 days, or between 18 and 23 working days depending on where the weekends and bank holidays fall.
• This makes it very hard to project ANYTHING month on month or indeed year on year with any degree of accuracy - because you are hardly ever comparing like and like. 

Now, I realise that calendar reform has got in with a bad crowd – it immediately suggests Year Zero and Pol Pot. And I think it’s fair to say that no one really wants to be associated with that.

I recently read “The World Set Free” by HG Wells.

Now, I know what many of you are thinking.

The Ogilvy Theatre

Most of you are thinking “that’s a conference centre in Woking”.

And, yes, it is – but I am talking about the writer, after whom the conference centre is named.

Some of the rest of you are thinking “hold on... apart from all the Good science fiction stuff, wasn’t all of HG Wells’ political and social thought Bad?”

Well, old Wellsy certainly doesn't make too many bones about how much better his future utopia would be without the poor, the stupid, the uncivilised and the uncultured in it – and he is not in favour of what we in the business world would call “achieving cuts by natural wastage”.

Nevertheless, almost in passing, he suggests that the year should be split in 13 months of four weeks each – with Easter as an annual intercalary day and leap years as specified by Pope Gregory XIII.  

Gregory would have approved. Probably. 

I think this is a tremendous idea and one not necessarily dependent on any kind of genocide or mass slaughter. 

It would make us all marginally younger and it would make the whole maths of time a lot easier. 

Who will join me in my quest for a rational year?