If we get out of this pandemic in one piece, there’s going to have to be some changes made, that’s for certain. Some changes will be major, some will be minor, some will be natural, some will feel odd, but but none will feel quite as odd as moving from December 31st 2023 to January 1st 2025 with a single tick of the clock.
No, time travel has not been invented yet – I have it from a reliable source that it was originally invented in the year 6946, to the double annoyance of the British who had hoped to perfect it in 6945 to mark the 5000th anniversary of VE Day and who not only failed to invent it in time but were beaten to the punch by the Germans – it’s something else.
Leap years are to be abolished.
At the International Time Conference in Greenwich, hosted remotely of course, senior chronologist Justin Thyme announced:
“In recent times leap years have just been so full of crap for the whole human race that we’ve made an emergency decision to get rid of them. It started with the whole Millennium Bug thing, and then there was the recession in 2008, then in 2016 both Brexit and Trump happened and now in 2020 we face potential extinction . . . leap years are not good for us so if we survive this we’re getting rid of them.”
Meaning that calendars in future will run 2021, 2022, 2023, 2025, 2026, 2027, 2029, 2030 and so on. This will of course have a bizarre knock-on effect on birthdays. A person born in 2000 will only be 28 in 2030, and won’t turn 30 until 2033. This will in turn cause chaos in school maths classes.
The greetings cards industry are already scratching their heads on how to tackle the problem but expect to have it sorted in time for the first skipped leap year.
The new calendar will come into effect in 2025, set to commence the minute 2023 ends.