Good morning and splendidly good wishes to one and all.

As you will by now be aware, the NHS decided not to amputate my neck on Thursday due to an influx of emergency cases which, naturally, take precedence over my trifling inconvenience. Further investigation revealed that they did indeed mean Sunday 30 March for me to arrive at the hotel with the surgery scheduled for Monday 31 March. However, as I wrote, this is too close to someone’s 60th wedding anniversary so I have had to decline that offer and will wait to hear. Something shortly after we return from the States would be ideal. I’ll let you know.

One of the silver linings in not having my brain excavated this week was that Penelope and I were able to enjoy one of our Christmas presents on Saturday evening after all. Nick and Lucy had given us tickets to attend (and accompany them) to a performance by Dara O'Briain, an Irish standup comedian, at the Warwick Arts Centre. When, however, I got the notice of the date for my surgery, we had to reluctantly concede that we would be unable to attend. Naturally, Nick and Lucy shopped around amongst all their friends to try and find someone who would go with them. Either they have no friends or none of them fancied seeing Dara O'Briain because they had been unable to commit anyone to attending with them by the time my surgery was cancelled on Tuesday afternoon. (I suppose it's just possible that no one wanted to be seen with Nick and Lucy but I find that highly improbable). Whatever, it was our good fortune - we went for a delicious dinner at their place and then meandered up to the Arts Centre on the university campus and sat through two hours of incredible, non-stop standup comedy. Naturally, my mother would not have approved of some of his routines and language but he is unbelievably quick and it was hilarious. We all came out with our jaws feeling somewhat sore as the strain of laughing uproariously for two hours took its toll.

A few of you have enquired about the earthquake which roused the UK out of its slumber on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning. It measured 5.2 on the Richter scale, apparently and was the most significant earthquake in twenty years. However, earthquakes in the UK are not all that unusual, it seems; there are something in the region of 200 earthquakes each year in the UK although only about 25 a year are of sufficient vigour to be felt by people. I thought I had slept through the one on Tuesday but Ms Playchute certainly was awakened and thought a large and very noisy lorry was rumbling up the hill in front of the house. As she awoke, however, she could no longer hear the engine of this particularly boisterous lorry and therefore deduced it must have been something else. The news headlines the following morning filled in the gaps. Then, on Wednesday evening when she was describing this to me I have to confess to having had a vague recollection of some large lorry similarly disrupting my sleep but clearly insufficiently to awaken me completely.

Found the following article on the BBC website moderately interesting. As one who is on an annual salary, it does seem to me that I am indeed working an extra day this year for no extra pay!

Who owns today? By Steve Tomkins It comes but once every four years and this 29 February some workers are being given the extra day as holiday. Employers won't like the idea, but we tend to look at additional time as a gift. Imagine that to adjust our timekeeping, 10 minutes had to be added to one day each year. You would expect them to be 10 minutes of free time, yours to spend as you will. You'd be miffed if they were added to one of your working hours, getting 10 minutes more work out of you for no extra money. But is this what leap year does to us? If you're on an annual salary, you will get the same pay as normal this year, while working one extra day. Is 29 February just another working Friday, or a sneaky bonus for your employer? Who does 29 February belong to? If you're starting to feel like a holiday today, you might be interested to hear that the National Trust has granted its whole workforce the day off. Calling it the Great Green Leap Day, they are asking staff to use it for the environment. "We're giving them this opportunity to look at steps to green their own lives at home," explains Mike Holland of the Trust. "Anything from converting to greener energy to starting a compost heap." Just how many will be converting, composting and otherwise greening and how many will be shopping is hard to say, but Holland hopes most of the workforce have caught the vision. He says it would be good to see other workplaces catch it, so if you can just wait till 2012 there might be one for you too. The National Trust does not want anyone to feel short-changed by their own employer. But if you do feel that way, then according to Steve Taylor, the author of Making Time: Why Time Seems to Pass at Different Speeds and How to Control It, there may be something in it. Time as a 'gift' The book argues that the way we perceive time is more real than the way we measure it. How else does time pass, except in our consciousness - sometimes faster, sometimes slower? When it comes to the extra day, like the extra hour when the clocks go back, he says, "We look on that time as a gift - just as in other ways we try to subtract time, like when we're on a long journey and immerse attention in a book". Perhaps, he agrees, employers may be getting an extra unpaid day out of us. "But then in a sense," he adds, "they own us already. We give half our waking hours to them, voluntarily, and our time is our lives - we're literally giving ourselves away." A thought which makes you want to hold on to any disputed days tighter than ever. Where did this extra day come from in the first place? We need the leap day because of the deplorable untidiness of our solar system. One of our earth years (a complete orbit around the sun) does not take an exact number of whole days (one complete spin of the earth on its axis). In fact, it takes 365.2422 days, give or take. The leap year was introduced by Julius Caesar in 46BC, to make the calendar tidier. The extra day every fourth year made the average year 365.25 days long. Time stealer This was still about 12 minutes longer than the solar year, which you can get away with on the short term, but in 1267 a monk called Roger Bacon noticed that the calendar had slipped nine days in the 13 intervening centuries. It then took the church until 1582 to accept that it was celebrating Easter on the wrong week. That year Pope Gregory XIII adjusted the calendar, introducing the system we go by today: every fourth year is a leap year, unless it is divisible by 100 and not by 400. This makes the year 365.2425 days, which is still a little under 26 seconds too long, but nothing to fret about. As a one off, Gregory's reform also skipped the 10 days they had gained since Caesar's time, jumping from 4 to 15 October 1582. It is said that this provoked demonstrations from people demanding their stolen days back. So how about demos today, to reclaim the working day pinched from employees by their employers? Go for it, brothers and sisters, but the TUC [Trade Union Congress] will not be organising it. A spokesperson says: "Salaried workers usually receive their annual salary in twelve monthly payments and know when they accept a job that some months are longer than others and that leap years come round once every so often. Indeed, leap years have been with us 1582, so the UK workforce has had a while to get used to the idea of an extra day every four years." OK, off you go then, back to work.

Since I was “working at home” on Friday, I said to myself, “Stuff this! I’m taking the day off.”

Then I got on with my work.

Love to you all,

Greg

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A new study says that having sex decreases your chances of getting a cold. The more sex you have, the less you'll have a cold. Just wait until guys get hold of this. A woman sneezes and he'll be saying,  "Hey, I've got something for that."

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A man decided to march in the holy crusades. Concluding that his wife should wear a chastity belt while he is gone, he locks up her nether regions and gives the key to his best friend. He tells him, "If I do not return within four years, unlock my wife and set her free to live a normal life."

So, the husband leaves on horseback and about a half hour later, he sees a cloud of dust behind him. He waits for it to come closer and sees his best friend.

"What's wrong?' " he asks.

"You gave me the wrong key!"

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We’ve had it before but it still made me chuckle a second (or third, or fourth) time:

A man once spent days looking for his new hat.  

Finally, he decided that he'd go to church on Sunday and sit at the back. During the service he would sneak out and grab a hat from the rack at the front door.  

On Sunday, he went to church and sat at the back. The sermon was about the 10 commandments.  

He sat through the whole sermon and instead of sneaking out he waited until the sermon was over and went to talk to the minister.  

"Father, I came here today to steal a hat to replace the one I lost. But after hearing your sermon on the 10 Commandments, I changed my mind."  

The minister said, "Bless you my son. Was it when I started to preach 'Thou shall not steal,' that changed your heart?"  

The man responded, "No, it was the one on adultery. When you started to preach on that, I remembered where I left my hat!"

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Paddy and Murphy are sitting in the pub one day having a quiet drink when a bloke walks in and slaps a 6 lb trout on the bar.  

"Jesus, Mary and Joseph!" said Paddy. "Where'd you get that?"  

"Well" said the man "I go to the part of the river by the bridge and get a friend to dangle me off the side. I can just reach the water and so when a fish comes near - I grab it!"  

"Aaaaaaah" exclaimed Murphy, "We will try it tomorrow!"  

So the next day Paddy and Murphy set off to the bridge by the river.  

Murphy is dangling Paddy over the side and after about 10 minutes Paddy yells "QUICK! Pull me up!"  

"Why, have you caught a fish?" asks Murphy.  

Paddy replies "No, but there's a bloody train coming!!" 

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