Leap day - or a workers lament

February 29th is an interesting day.

In reality it only comes around once every four years and it is a demonstration how people are generally squeezed out of at least ten minutes of their lives each year and once every four years they are slugged with an extra day of work!

Who can we thank for all this extra work load? Who can we thank for depriving us of 10 minutes of salary every year and then to top that off an additional day of work at no extra charge!

Well big Julie started it all off (yeah you know the one, Julius Caesar the one who finally got his in the rotunda, the guy whose travel journals some of us had to translate from his original Latin into something meaningful like English, the guy who kept putting all his verbs at the end of an extremely long sentence!)

Big Julie had the bright idea of making a year 365.25 days as far back as 468 BC and you really have to remember the BC because it means BEFORE THE CHRISTIAN ERA and not alas, before the Caesars.

By 1267, the monk, Roger Bacon, made an astonishing observation.

He was smart enough to notice that the calendar had slipped some nine days in 13 centuries and that people were celebrating Easter on the wrong day.

Now of course you begin to understand the reason I asked you to focus on the BC or Before the Christian Era.

Had there been no "Christian Era" we would not have had Bacon and his observations and we would all have had big Julie's calendar to this day!

Alas, being a monk Bacon appears to have had a lot of time on his hands (so to speak) and wanted to adjust big Julie's calendar.

It didn't really matter to him, that he had no idea WHEN the real final days of Christ (the days leading to Easter) took place, nor did it seem to matter that the pagan celebration of of the Northern Hemisphere Spring, with all the fertility symbols that rabbits and eggs represent were not a really Christian things. Both he and Big Julie knew and used MATHEMATICS - you know the things that are used by the people we really loved at school, especially when they tried to explain long division and other arcane things like 'cos' and the meaning of 'pi' and of course all those other 'wise men' who want to ensure that the working classes get their just deserts, simply because it's mathematically correct!

Thank goodness no one took notice of his finding until 1582.

This time the person who took note was a real force in the world. Pope Gregory XIII (that's the 13th for all of you who can't read Latin numbers - a number traditionally associated with bad luck) adjusted the calendar to the one we use today.

A calendar moreover that has some interesting quirks of its own. Did you know for example that every fourth year is a leap year UNLESS it it divisible by 100 and not 400?

This form of calculation still makes the year a little under 26 seconds too long, but what the hey, it's as close as we are going to get without having to adjust every watch, clock and digital time piece around the world. (Mind you there is a great marketing opportunity there somewhere for someone who is brave enough to face the consequences.

So now we, the working poor, not only give up ten minutes a year for four years, but once every four years we are slugged with an extra day of work as well!

It's darned unfair if you ask me - and all because of mathematicians and the rich and powerful.