Does anyone else think it's weird our 9th, 10th, 11th & 12th months are literally named 7th, 8th, 9th & 10th (Sept to Dec)?
I'm sure there's a perfunctory, boring reason - probably at the behest of one of history's most interesting & romantic figures - the civil servant; but I don't think I want to know that.
I'm with the 8 year old me who would imagine an upside down table in the living room was a boat being thrown about on the (shark infested) high seas.
I'd rather imagine some invading horde besieged Rome with their strange aquamarine banners, stitched in the Urals or Katmandu by expert craftsmen who were killed on completion to keep the secrets of their intricate craft from falling into enemy hands, fluttering in the breeze on the banks of the Tiber, to demand some late Emperor or early Pope insert an extra two months in the calendar.
Perhaps the truth is stranger still and more interesting, perhaps more baffling. But I doubt it. So don't tell me.
And as I look at the calendar proclaiming today the tenth month of the year, called October, starts and we move further into autumn and headlong towards 2017 wherein I shall be another year older and continue to pay bills and put up with all the cares and worries of adulthood, I can at least imagine those swarthy hordes encamped outside the Eternal City to demand those two extra months.
If it didn't happen that way I don't want to know about it.
Below: a Goth. He likes Blue Oyster Cult and tribal tattoos. His mum says he should clean his room and wear brighter clothes. Whatevs.
