The river is still high today, albeit a long way from it's record in 2000. It doesn't really cause me any problems apart from having to go a slightly longer route to get my lunchtime sandwich. Which today was Piri-Piri chicken. Not really sure what that actually is - it seemed to have chillis in it.
I was thinking about the months of the year today whilst working on a spreadsheet. A lot of what follows will be old news to many of you so feel free to skip ahead to the end. I spotted that the final four months of the year (September to December) are all clearly named after the numbers seven to ten (in Latin). Then I thought "Hmmm, that's odd, why stop at 10?". Did there used to be only 10 months? Were old months longer? Was the old year shorter? I knew that various Caesar typers had renamed a few of them, but that doesn't really explain why there were only 10. Well, I have done some research and here are my findings...
The Roman calendar only used to have ten named months: Artius, Aprilis, Maius, Junius, Quintilis, Sextilis, September, October, November, and December. The last four are probably familiar to you. There were two unnamed months too, which occured around about now, after Christmas. Except that I don't think they had Christmas then. And even if they did, I suspect it would have been at a different time of the year since didn't the church move it to coincide with an old pagan festival? Anyway, I digress. The unnamed months were during the cold bit.
Then the fun started. The second King of Rome, Numa Pompilious came along and decided that it was a little confusing not being able to refer to a whole sixth of the year by name. “Hey Numa – whenus is yer birthdayus?”. “Um, it’s on the eighth of…darn. Hang on, I am king! I can do what I want. I can name months! I hereforthwithus call them: Anuarius and Februarius. They are great names”. And so Our modern 12 month calendar was semi-born.
King Pompilious also added one other innovation – a thirteenth month called Intercalaris – this month was after Februarius and only happened every so often – it was the predecessor to our Leap Day in February. I’m not sure this would be so popular now – a whole month of having to avoid girls so that they can’t try and marry you! Or possibly a whole month hanging round them so that they will…
This state of affairs then continued for roughly six and a half hundred years. In 46BC, Mr Julius Caesar came along, reformed the whole thing, and named Julius after himself. Later, Augustus Caesar got in on the act and claimed the month formerly known as Sextilis as his own. And they fiddled with some days, got rid of Intercalaris and added the leap day as we know it now.
And since then, things have remained fairly constant. Unless lunatics like this guy get their way…
That is the end of today’s educational content. Hope it was useful for you.
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