Calendars

Calendar derives from calends, the Latin name for the first day of the Roman month, signifying the start of a new lunar phase. Logically. given that the lunar cycle is twenty-nine days, one might have expected the Roman year to have had twelve or thirteen months (365.25/29 =12.6). But in fact in pre-Julian times they had only ten of them, beginning in spring with March (mensis Martius)and leaving winter as an unspecified number of days between the end of the tenth month (mensis December) and the beginning of the new year on the next calends of March. Oh, and their year wasn't 365.25 days long either.

If you think that's complicated, in addition they didn't number their days forward from the beginning of the month as we do (April 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th et cetera). They fixed the key dates in each month, calends (new moon), nones (first half moon) and ides (full moon) and then named the other days by counting down (backwards) inclusively e.g. fifth day before the calends, third day before the ides. No wonder Julius Caesar came along in the first century BC and reformed the calendar altogether, as well as inventing the Caesar salad. (OK, I lied about that last bit. The salad was first created by an Italian, Caesar Cartini, at his restaurant in Tijuana, Mexico in 1924.)  

If after that your head is spinning and you're seeing stars, then you're in about the right frame of mind to enjoy the centrepiece of today's blog, which takes the form of a short piece of fiction that came to me recently in a dream.

There was considerable excitement in the control centre of the National Space Programme on the nones of April 2025 as the rocket carrying the NERO satellite blasted off spectacularly from Piltdown. Hours later, after successful separation of boosters and then the main load module, NERO settled precisely into its designated high earth orbit with all systems functioning AOK. It was a proud moment for Juvenal Roman, project director at the NSP, and his young wife and lead data analyst, Fion. 

At the launch after-party, much mead was quaffed and venison canapes scoffed, (non-alcoholic and vegan alternatives were on offer), and the exhausted but ecstatic scientists chatted enthusiastically about how their project, ten years in the making, was going to open a watching window on the true state of Earth's well-being. And later still, by the light of  a quarter moon shafting gently in through their own bedroom window, Juvenal and Fion in drunken, happy coupling conceived the child who would become Gaia.

There had been much talk for decades about 'global warming', the 'greenhouse effect' and the need to reduce the planet's 'carbon footprint'. Many scientists had warned of the dire consequences of rapid deforestation and a continued reliance on burning fossil fuels. They were continually challenged by the climate change deniers, the powerful businesses and their lobbyists who asserted that the scientific hypotheses were alarmist, miscalculated, and that all would be well, just wait and see.

Now NERO, the National Earth Reconnaissance Orbiter, loaded with the latest cutting-edge technology, would be able to monitor one hundred and seventeen different chemical, electrical and physical markers indicating the true state of the planet's eco-systems. Indeed, it would be able to look into the very soul of planet earth itself, and feed back minutely both diagnosis and prognosis to the watching Piltdown men and women charged with receiving and interpreting its datastream.

For months, all went smoothly. The orbiter sent back data that did indeed seem to support the predictions of the climate scientists, that slow but subtle changes in the planet's eco-systems were under way, in the atmosphere and in the oceans in particular, suggesting that the increase in global air and sea temperatures were systemic and that the increase in ice melt, storms and fires were neither random nor cyclical.

First of all, the major autocracies of China, Russia and the USA, brought all their state media to bear on suggesting the information being streamed back from NERO was either faked or was being erroneously interpreted, at which point Piltdown began sharing it widely with universities and scientific institutes in the free world.

Then attempts were made to jam the signals being beamed down to Earth, but the Piltdown scientists, in conjunction with allied faculties in Europe, Australasia and South America under the auspices of UNOOSA (the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs) found ways to stay one step ahead of the jammers.

Meanwhile, in parallel with the project's progress, Fion's pregnancy also moved smoothly forward. The parents-to-be were delighted with embryonic Gaia's development, as were their work colleagues, who regarded the prospective baby as a good omen. Fion was spared the worst of morning sickness. The most notable thing about an otherwise unnoteworthy pregnancy was her summerlong craving for strawberries. She was able to continue leading the data analysis work at NSP control centre right up until the beginning of December.

It was on Christmas Day morning that things started to go wrong. First of all there was the car accident. Some possibly drunken motorist clipped the Romans' car as they were driving to Mass and it ended up in the ditch. The reckless driver was never found. Fortunately, Juvenal and Fion were not seriously injured, but they were badly shaken and therefore taken to the local hospital for a check over. It was while they were there that the sudden shock caused Fion to go into premature labour.

Then there was the collision with a large piece of space junk that caused some serious damage to NERO as it spun around miles overhead. The satellite went 'offline'. The deputy duty officer at the NSP contacted Juvenal as soon as the serious nature of the event became clear and it took some persuading from Fion that he should go to Piltdown at once  to take charge of the situation. There ought never to have been any foreign bodies in the remote orbit of NERO and conspiracy theories were soon rife as the team in the control centre strove to understand and rectify the situation. The satellite was still in its correct orbit but had seemingly gone mute. It was a baffling scenario. Juvenal returned to the hospital.

Baby Gaia was delivered in an extremely distressed condition after a difficult and protracted labour. She only lived for a few hours. Her little life expired at the dead of night, with her heartbroken parents clinging to the incubator in grief and disbelief.

Curiously, it was at almost exactly that same moment (with just a few minutes' delay, as they tallied the events later) that NERO's comms channels suddenly burst into life again. Only what was being sent back was no longer a 'real time' feed of data and images. Over the next hours and days Piltdown was in receipt of a flow of future-stamped information and pictures, a flood of data and images similar to the time-lapse photography and fast-forwarding calendars that are tricks of the movie trade. 

Somehow NERO was racing through the rest of the 2020s and into the 2030s and 2040s at the rate of a decade a day, streaming data about spiralling temperatures, rising sea levels, extensive droughts, devastating floods, global storms the like of which hadn't been seen before. If the data were alarming, the visual images of a planet in crisis were even more frightening. How was this even possible? There could be no credible scientific explanation for the phenomenon of NERO going into prophetic mode as the team started calling it. Fion and Juvenal were back in the control centre by now, trying to assess what exactly was happening. It helped them to cope with their tragic loss to have something so baffling and portentous to figure out.

NERO was in one-way mode, sending masses of future data, unresponsive to all attempts from Piltdown to reset and return to its real time mission. The scientists at NSP could only monitor in amazement as the satellite streamed information and pictures purporting to be from twenty, thirty, forty years into the future. This bizarre and frightening newsreel came to an end with horrific statistics and images from October 2066. Someone observed that would be a thousand years since the Norman Conquest, though it may not have had any relevance. The last pictures NERO sent before shutting down again (this time for ever) were of planet Earth consumed by firestorms after days of cataclysmic nuclear war.

Baby Gaia was laid to rest on New Year's Day 2026. The NSP was closed for the occasion apart from its security detail, for NERO was silent now. All of the scientific staff attended the little girl's funeral. It was the hottest January day on record.

I've not written a new poem this week. Instead, as a cheering musical bonus, have a listen to the excellent Coral with Calendars and Clocks from their debut album of 2002. (Just click on the song title.)

Thanks for reading, and have a good week. S ;-)

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Dull Calendars

Guess who was born in Small Heath, Birmingham, about seventy years ago and grew up having a passion for football and history and is now known as the Dullest Man in Britain. I’ll give you a clue. He supports A.... V....

Yes, it wasn’t me but how a boy from Small Heath supported the V is beyond me.

The man’s name is Kevin Beresford and it all started back in 2003. Here’s how:

"I run a small print shop in Redditch, and in 2003 I wanted to create a calendar for our customers. Redditch had three prisons, no cinema, but copious roundabouts and so, for the laugh, my employees and I decided on Round-A-Bouts of Redditch.

"I was in a pub one Friday night when a friend called to say it was on the Graham Norton Show. Graham was flicking through a calendar of gorgeous Greek islands with his guest and brought Roundabouts of Redditch out as a comparison. I absolutely loved it. It changed my life. Demand rocketed for the calendar. We had initially printed 100 copies – soon we were selling to people around the world."

It sold 100,000 copies.

Since then, he has published a series of calendars reflecting his interest in the ordinary things in life. For example Village Notice Boards. He says: "Why was I drawn to village notice boards? I have found you can learn a lot from a village notice board. As you approach one you can see even from a distance that with the amount of notice sheets pinned to the board you can get a fair indication of how much is going on in this small part of the world. Quantity on the board of course is not the be all and end all. One proud board can boast an art-house village cinema albeit a tiny one. Another trumpets Shakespeare’s play, Richard III....the half hour version. Boards proclaiming 44 days of art festival. And there is always the obligatory lost cat. Bless."

In 2022 he published 'The Wonderful World of Jack Grealish’s Calves'. 

"When he left V.... to go over to the dark side, I felt that he was leaving us behind. So, when I first printed the calendar, I guess it was a little act of revenge. But I have forgiven him now."

This year is a belter with him publishing a celebration of his top 12 mobility scooter riders he spotted riding around Benidorm when on holiday at his mate’s flat. "While I was walking about I was amazed just how many people were on mobility scooters so I decided to take some pictures. I even snapped a chap who was dressed in a Santa Claus outfit".

He has made calendars of benches, bus routes, telephone boxes and other seemingly unexciting features of British life. He’s produced calendars of prisons and old asylums. He loves grisly subjects, steeped in history, although he’s also thinking of doing one on recycling centres.

He tries to do ten calendars a year. He gets inspiration from everyday life. Martin Parr, the celebrated British photographer, sent him a text saying he admired his work. He says that made him feel wonderful.

His major claim to dull fame came in 2018, when he was named Anorak of the Year by the Dull Men’s Club. It’s an international collective of people that welcomes everyone, not just men, who find joy in the mundane. Their motto is ‘celebrating the ordinary’. Other members include a drain spotter and a fellow who has collected 20,000 milk bottles. After that, newspapers began to dub him ‘Britain’s dullest man’.

His website can be found at: https://dullkev.com/

I’d have a calendar of Billy Collins poems.

Invention

Tonight the moon is a cracker,
with a bite out of it
floating in the night,

and in a week or so
according to the calendar
it will probably look

like a silver football,
and nine, maybe ten days ago
it reminded me of a thin bright claw.

But eventually --
by the end of the month,
I reckon --

it will waste away
to nothing,
nothing but stars in the sky,

and I will have a few nights

to myself,
a little time to rest my jittery pen.

                                                    Billy Collins

Thanks for reading, Terry Q.

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I Saw Three Ships...

...come sailing in. And in case you think I've missed the boat with that one, let me tell you it's Christmas Eve today in Greece. You read that correctly. For the 250 million Christians of the Orthodox persuasion (not just in Greece but in many other nations of south-eastern Europe) their Christmas is this week-end. That's because the Orthodox Church stuck by the holy days as  originally established according to the Julian calendar when the Catholic Church and most of Europe changed to the Gregorian calendar. You're excused for being a little rusty about the switch, It did happen several hundred years ago, so let me re-cap.

The old Roman calendar used to consist of twelve months of twenty-nine or thirty-one days (making 355 in all) plus an additional Intercalaris period tacked on the end of February, making the Roman year 377 days long. This was clearly out of step with the cycle of the solar year of approximately 365.25 days, so Julius Caesar in a reform of 45 BC introduced by edict the Julian calendar, doing away with the Intercalaris and making the months the lengths we know today, of thirty or thirty-one days except for February at twenty-eight or twenty-nine each fourth (leap) year, thus making the new Roman calendar align with the solar year. 

He was a smart guy - but not totally so, for the solar year is not exactly 365.25 days long. It is fractionally shorter than that, meaning that the Julian calendar was out of step with the solar cycle to the extent of one day per century, and by the 16th century AD this over-compensation had become apparent to all, not just the astronomers of the age. Therefore in 1582, Pope Gregory XIII introduced by Papal Bull a much-needed modification. 

It did two things. Firstly it gave us the Gregorian calendar which differed from the Julian in that not every fourth February would be a leap year. It excluded years exactly divisible by 100 unless they were also divisible by 400; so 1600 and 2000 were leap years but 1700, 1800 and 1900 were not. In this way the over-estimation that existed in the Julian calendar was removed. The second thing it had to do was make an historical correction for the difference that had crept in over the centuries as the calendar year had got progressively ahead of the solar year. This was done by skipping (effectively losing) ten days at a stroke, but it was not uniformly implemented. 

Although the countries of south-eastern Europe align with the Gregorian calendar in everyday affairs, the Orthodox church chose to retain the Julian calendar for religious festivals, didn't skip the ten days and thus Orthodox Christmas is celebrated approximately ten days later in Greece (and Belarus, Bosnia, Egypt, Montenegro, Russia and Serbia). As a side-note, Ukraine used to celebrate it in January but recently adopted the Western convention of 25th December specifically to distance itself from Russia.

In case you were wondering about the three ships motif, and the beautiful photographs I've used to illustrate this  Light In Our Darkness  blog, they are all examples of Karavaki, ('small boats' in Greek) and the old Greek tradition of lighting up boats rather than trees during the festive period. I'm sure you'll agree they look stunning.

For a nation made up of hundreds of islands and with the sea and sailing featuring so prominently in people's livelihoods,  history and culture, perhaps this tradition shouldn't come as a surprise. It's also the case that many of the southern islands have always been quite barren places without access to fir trees. Add to that the fact that St. Nicholas is the patron saint of sailors and his feast day falls on December 6th and it is quite understandable why nearly every small port and coastal town in the country has decorated the boats in their harbours with strings of lights in tribute and thanksgiving during the longest nights from December into January.

I think it's a beautiful tradition and one that appears to be spreading from the tiny harbours and tavernas and is being embraced  increasingly across the country. For even nowadays when Christmas trees have become more common in public spaces in Greece, there are almost always wonderfully lit examples of karavaki - the Christmas boat - to accompany them.

Those of you who know of my abiding love for Greece and all things Greek won't be surprised to read that I'll be enjoying moussaka this evening and raising a glass of Mavrodaphni (literally 'black laurel') wine from Patras to mark the occasion. Καλά Χριστούγεννα.

And given the auspicious date, I've chosen as a poem this week a though-provoking piece by my favourite Greek poet, Konstantinos P. Kavafis, better known in English as C.P. Cavafy.

Candles

Days to come stand in front of us

like a row of burning candles -

golden, warm, and vivid candles.

Days past fall behind us,

a gloomy line of burnt-out candles;

the nearest are still smoking,

cold, melted, and bent.

I don't want to look at them: their shape saddens me,

and it saddens me to remember their original light.

I look ahead at my burning candles.

I don't want to turn, don't want to see, terrified

how quickly that dark line gets longer,

how quickly one more dead candle joins another.

                                                         C.P. Cavafy, 1899

Happy New Year. Thanks for reading, We all shine on. S ;-)

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