That great sage Mrs Rollo, remarked at the weekend that because I am currently not going to work (because of Section 7 of the Public Health Order Act 2010) that every day feels like the weekend to her, especially considering that I am almost always around and that we can go for a walk most days of the week.
I can understand this. As with many cultural concepts which we impose upon the world, although the concept of a week is one of those things which people might have us believe is universal. The truth is that it is not.
The very ancient Romans and Etruscans used what is known as a nundinal cycle, which was not only the commercial market week but the civic and royal week of audiences with authority. That week was 8 days long.
The Welsh word for week is "wythnos" which isn't all that helpful until you consider that the word actually refers to an 8 day cycle just like the very ancient Romans.
Elsewhere in the Gaelic and Celtic world, they referred to a sidereal month which was usually divided into thirds; and it being 27 or 28 nights long, means that you have a 9 day week.
Even weirder is that the ancient Chinese and Hindu nations in Asia, didn't really seem to have a concept of what a week was at all under Alexander The Great went about smashing everything left, right and centre, on his ill-conceived missions of conquest. This was in contrast to the period of history where the various independent Greek city states ran everything and anything but mostly divided a month into a waxing and waning period either side of the full moon.
The Egyptians appear to have had a thirty day per month calendar, with 12 months in the year and then an intercalculary period of five or six days to make the years line up with the solstices.
If history has given us 7, 8, 9, 14/15 days in a week, then I am not entirely sure that this is a hard wired concept in the minds of humans.
Having said all of that though, I must admit that because my cultural markers of what constitutes a week, which also includes what various elements of media have been released, whether or not I need to vacuum clean the house, and whether or not I need to operate equipment for church on Sunday, are still in place I still have a very good handle on what a week is.
On top of that because I wear a watch, I am continually reminded of what day of the week it is because it tells me.
My watch which has been built as a mechanical slave to the cultural overlay which we have imposed upon the world, never varies. It can not. Clocks are built with the northern hemisphere in mind (the sun travels across the southern skies in the northern hemisphere in a clockwise direction) and they are built for that cultural overlay. My never changing, mechanical slave, can not give me anything else apart from two twelve hour periods and a seven day week.
I can imagine a clock built for decimal time (Freder in Thea Von Harbou's 1925 book 'Metropolis' is confused with decimal time used for the people of the underlands and duodecimal time for the people of the city) and so if our cultural overlay upon time is malleable, then that must surely apply to a 7, 8, 9, or 14/15 day week. I could also imagine that several hundred years' into the future if people should manage to colonise the dusty red plains of the fourth planet (after trashing the third planet) then the ideas of days, months and years would also be malleable. A Mars Sol is slightly longer than an Earth Sol.
For many people, days, weeks and months have blended together because without any kind of structure, the cultural overlays simply either cease to function or are irrelevant. I on the other hand am still aware of the obligations that I have to other people, and I am very much aware that am ordered to remain in place.
Days still happen. Helicopters which fly over at night time, helpfully have red and blue lights to remind us that a curfew is in place.
Just like helicopters, time might fly but time also roosts. Time lays eggs of hope and those eggs do not hatch but putrefy and go bad. I continue to wait for announcements relating to when I will be next allowed to go to work again.
Today is Monday. Monday is a working day. I have still got work to do.
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