- by Owen Morton
What happens only once every four years? No, it’s not the anniversary of Heath the Rat’s death (that’s actually only once every seven years), but it is this bizarre thing known as a Leap Year. Now, it occurs to me that today is the first one since Heath the Rat’s Silly Page got going, and – if we’re going to be completely honest with each other – I think it’s rather unlikely the website will be still going in 2008 (though, of course, one should never say never, which is a stupid cliché if ever I wrote one), so we should take this opportunity to write a stupid article about it.
So, let’s all wrack our brains (I love the word ‘wrack’: it brings to mind all sorts of images, the primary one – for some completely inexplicable reason – being a large roast lamb joint) to try to work out exactly what a leap year is. I recall when I was very little, a Leap Year sounded a most exciting proposition: a year when everybody had to leap. I was born in 1983, so technically my first Leap Year would have been 1984, but I remember very little – indeed, nothing – of that year, so I’m inclined to suggest that the first Leap Year I had any particular experience of would have been 1988. To a five-year-old, the prospect of seeing everybody leaping about for an entire year is a very enticing one, and the possibility that this is not, in fact, what a Leap Year entails does not really enter one’s head.
Sadly, however, my father broke the news to me that the only person likely to be doing any leaping in 1988 on account of it being a Leap Year was me, and he voiced doubts that even I could keep it up for the entire year. Well, I proved him wrong! Well, actually, I proved him right, but I attempted to prove him wrong first.
Anyway, exciting as this little anecdote has been, it has brought us no closer to actually discovering what a Leap Year is. One image that does spring to mind connected with Leap Years is, of course, a kangaroo, obviously due to the use of the word ‘leap’. The kangaroo that my mind conjures up has a really quite mean expression on its face, rather like this:
But, to be fair, this has little or nothing to do with Leap Years.
A Leap Year, as probably everyone reading this drivel is aware, is a year on which some genius added an extra day at the end of February. Personally, I’d have put it in July or August, so we could have an extra day of summer. (Yes, I know that’s not how it works, but I really couldn’t care less.) As it is, we get an extra day of cold, skanky February, when there’s nothing to do but write stupid website articles about stupid days of the year.
I’m bored now. See you in March.