The Twenty-Ninth of February shouldn't really exist.

Face it. Our present calendar is daft. A chopped up mess of civil time-keeping that we accept, submissive as lambs, as our inheritance from a succession of self-serving religious weirdos.

We live, work and raise our families to the prescribed days of the so-called Gregorian Calendar: a creation often erroneously attributed to Gregory the Great; but one that was actually instituted by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 by way of a papal bull entitled, Inter gravissimas.

1582, incidentally, was the year that Shakespeare got married. So the calendar he marked with his quill pen was essentially the same one you still call up on your computer.

PAPAL BULL

Not that it matters. It's a load of bull whoever carries the responsibility- a 400-year-old modification of the 2000-year-old Julian Calendar adapted through papal authority to fit the convenience of the church.

No matter that the days, months, weeks and seasons had to be juggled with a total disregard for the realities of the solar system. The church chose instead to adjust reality to accommodate the so-called holy-days and to transfer the celebration of Gregory the Great's consecration outside the period of Lent.

Other churches made their own rules and still abide by them - so that here we are in the 21st Century, living by a time-keeping scheme that is inaccurate, confusing, and - despite all attempts at reform - as seemingly immutable as the silly religions themselves.

A GREAT LEAP BACKWARD

While the world seeks to move forward, it does so to a calendar that was intentionally a great leap backward - the primary purpose of the Gregorian Calendar being to restore to the 14th Century a system of time-keeping that was followed by the early Christians some twelve hundred years earlier.

So it should surprise no one that academics the world over go home and kick the cat every night in pure and absolute aggravation as they struggle to achieve Calendar Reform.

The Twenty-Ninth of February seems to me to be a good day to support these frustrated fellows. Let's speak out for a better system, and urge our governments to see the benefits of an organized year in which every month has the same number of days, every week starts on a predictable date, and so on.

CONSIDER THE OPTIONS

We have a number of excellent options, set down by some of the brightest people on the planet, so before we leap off into space measuring our time by something as unreadable as Grandma's shopping list, why don't we urge the adoption of a universally acceptable system based on science rather than mythology?

Some of the best suggestions (you can investigate many others) are:

* The World Calendar
* The Symmetry 454 Calendar
* Common-Civil-and-Time Calendar
* The 13-month "Sol" Calendar
* The 30x11 Calendar

All of these are based on making the measurement of the year easily divisible. The day is easily measured in halves, thirds and quarters, as is each of its twenty-four hours, achieving obvious practical advantages.

In an age of precise time-keeping and accurate clocks, there is simply no good reason for maintaining an anachronistic scheme invented in a pre-scientific, theocratic society, with a feudal economy.

Let's start talking Calendar Reform - loudly and persistently - and stop living by a system as outdated and unneeded as all those other religious prejudices.

- Himself