Blogger’s Note: Apologies if you received notification that this post was published last Thursday, and were then unable to open it. I had an issue last week with the post not displaying in paragraphs, and I was trying to troubleshoot it when I accidentally published this post in draft form.

Blogger’s Second Note: According to my Excel tracking sheet, this is the 200th post that I have published, since I started the blog in November 2019. This means that, at an average of 1500 words a post, for the same investment of effort I could have written a 300,000-word novel and made my fortune. And there’s my life in a nutshell, really.

Let me start by wishing you all a happy and healthy 5784. In this post, in a rather roundabout way, I celebrate the everyday miracle that is the passage of the year.

From the mid-1960s until, in its second resurrection, a one-off special in 2011, BBC television featured, on and off, a celebrity panel game show entitled Call My Bluff. Two teams of three competed to earn points by identifying the correct definitions of obscure words. The teams took turns to give three definitions, one true and two bluffs. If the opposing team correctly identified the true definition, they earned a point; if not, the bluffing team earned a point.

Examples of words used in the show include queach, strongle, ablewhacket, hickboo, jargoon, zurf, morepork, and jirble (which clearly indicates that the show was designed to be a place where people who loved words could meet to share their enjoyment of the idiosyncrasies of the English language). The show also had an inbuilt upper-class pomposity, the original teams being led by Robert Morley (noted for his numerous film portrayals of archetypal pompous upper-class establishment characters) and Frank Muir. The latter was a wordsmith best known for his partnership with Denis Nordern, writing comedy for radio – Take It From Here, Whacko, Brothers in Law (no hyphens, since it was a sit com about a law firm). However, he was also characterised by his upper-class accent (particularly his slightly weak, unrolled ‘r’ sound) and his pink, spotted bow tie. Later team leaders included a genuine lord (Patrick Campbell, 3rd Baron Glenavy) and the very upper-crust actress Joanna Lumley.

You will doubtless not be too shocked to discover that I, or rather my even more pretentious late-teen to early-adult self, loved the game.

I mention it only as an introduction to the Call-My-Bluff-type challenge I set you today. I am going to offer you no fewer than four explanations of the origin of a well-known phrase or saying, and ask you to guess which, if any, is the correct one. (I am already picking out in my mind a select group of potential readers who will actually know the correct answer.) Full disclosure: until a couple of weeks ago I laboured under the delusion that one of the bluffs was, in fact, the correct explanation. Further full disclosure: Just because an explanation is not the correct basis for the phrase ‘once in a blue moon’ does not necessarily mean that the facts stated in the explanation are false.

A couple of weeks ago, on 31 August, we had the rare occurrence of a super blue moon. You can see it here, as it appeared over Darwin. The ‘super’ refers to the fact that it was a full moon occurring at the point in the moon’s orbit around the earth when it is closest to the earth, resulting in the moon appearing to us as larger than it does at any other time. The ‘blue’ refers to…what, exactly? We assume that it is something rare, because it has given rise to the phrase ‘once in a blue moon’. However, it is far from clear exactly what that rare occurrence is. So, which of the four explanations below do you buy?

Just before we dive into the explanations, some background in simple astronomical arithmetic is probably a good idea. About halfway through the next six paragraphs, you may, however, start to disagree that it is a good idea. It’s not in the test, so feel free to skip it.

We need to understand the relation between the lunar and the solar cycle. The Gregorian calendar is a solar calendar, whose two basic units are the day (the length of time it takes the earth to spin on its axis one complete revolution) and the year (the length of time it takes the earth to orbit the sun once).

• A solar (or tropical) year is approximately 365.24 days long (which explains why we add a leap day every four years – and why we also don’t add a leap day when the year is divisible by 100 but not divisible by 400, because 0.24 is just a bit less than a quarter).
• A lunation (one lunar cycle – a lunar ‘month’, if you will) is 29.53 days.

This means that, if we want to have a calendar based on lunar months, but also want it to align with the solar calendar, we have a problem, because 365.24 divided by 29.53 is 12.37.

In other words, if we had 12 lunar months in a year, the year would be about 11 days shorter than the solar year. If we had 13 lunar months, it would be about 19 days longer than the solar year.

For this reason, several civilisations developed a calendar based on a cycle of 19 years (known as a Metonic cycle, after the Greek astronomer Meton who ‘discovered’ it). 11 days is about 7/19 of a solar month. So, if we add a lunar month 7 times in every cycle of 19 years, then every 19 years our calendar will realign with the solar calendar.

This is how the Jewish calendar works (by adding – or intercalating – an extra month every two or three years during the 19-year cycle). It is also the way the Babylonians, the early Romans, the Bahais, and probably the Iron Age Celts and Polynesians, among others, constructed their calendars, some of them at least 1500 years before Meton.

And so to the explanations of the origin of the phrase ‘once in a blue moon’:

Explanation A

Explanation B

The term ‘blue moon’ originated in an anti-clerical pamphlet (attacking the Roman clergy, and Cardinal Thomas Wolsey in particular) by two converted Greenwich friars, William Roy and Jerome Barlow, published in 1528 under the title Rede me and be not wrothe, for I say no thynge but trothe (Read Me and Don’t Get Angry for I Say Nothing but the Truth), . The relevant passage reads:

O churche men are wyly foxes […] Yf they say the mone is blewe / We must beleve that it is true / Admittynge their interpretacion.] (O, churchmen are wily foxes…If they say the moon is blue, we must believe that it is true, accepting their interpretation.)

The context of the passage is a dialogue between two priest’s servants, spoken by the character “Jeffrey” . The intention may simply be that Jeffrey makes an absurd statement, “The moon is blue”, to make the point that priests require laymen to believe in statements even if they are patently false.

From here, it is a short step to saying that something happens only when the moon is blue: in other words, never.

Explanation C

Because there are 12 solar months in a year and, in some years, 13 lunar months, there are occasions when two full moons occur in the same solar month. (This cannot happen in February, because even in a leap year February has too few days to fit in two full moons). For example, in 2023, there was a full moon on 1 August and again on 31 August. When this happens, printed calendars traditionally print the second full moon in blue; hence it is known as a blue moon.

Explanation D

The phrase ‘blue moon’ derives from ‘belewe’, which is an Old English word meaning ‘betray’, because the extra full moon betrays the usual perception of one full moon per solar month.

Now we come to what I believe is known in the trade as ‘the big reveal’. The answer is that, in fact, none of the answers is correct. If you feel cheated, I would point out that, in the fourth paragraph of this post I invited you: “to guess which, if any, is the correct one.”

I always believed it was Explanation C, but, in fact, this is based on an incomplete piece of research by a writer on astronomy. Which leads us to Explanation E, the genuine explanation.

Explanation E

The Maine Farmers Almanac, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, divided the year into four ‘average’ seasons, each three solar months long. Normally, a season would include 3 full moons. Each of these full moons had a specific name, as follows:

• January: Wolf Moon
• February: Snow Moon
• March: Worm Moon
• April: Pink Moon
• May: Flower Moon
• June: Strawberry Moon
• July: Buck Moon
• August: Sturgeon Moon
• September: Full Corn Moon
• October: Hunter’s Moon
• November: Beaver Moon
• December: Cold Moon

As you can see, these names very much reflect the agricultural and natural world of North America.

In a season that included a fourth full moon, the third full moon of the season was designated a Blue Moon, and the first, second and fourth full moons of the season used the normal full moon names. In other words, a blue moon is not necessarily the second full moon in a month (although it often happens to be that as well); it is, rather, the third full moon of a season with four full moons..

Which is probably more than you wanted or needed to know on the subject, but I hope at least some of you enjoyed Explanations A and B, which are factually correct, but do not account for the use of ‘blue moon’ in the phrase ‘once in a blue moon’, and Explanation D, which is spurious speculation.

Fortunately, I can usually bank on getting at least one picture of each grandson having a good time far more frequently than once in a blue moon!

When I was growing up, I would, from time to time, feel that life had dealt me some injustice or other. Not that it often did, you understand, and I am prepared to concede that some of what I perceived as injustices might, objectively, have actually been ‘justices’, as it were. Be that as it may, in my eyes injustices they were. On such occasions, I would usually turn to my mother, complaining to her that ”It’s not fair!”. To which she would inevitably reply: “No, it’s dark.” When you’re eight, or ten, or twelve, there’s no response to that. I ended up feeling that one further example of the world’s unfairness was that my mother was clearly on the side of injustice. Sadly, my mother died 20 years ago, and so I can no longer apologise to her for the injustice that I did to her in my childhood and, in all honesty, for many years afterwards, in resenting the unwavering nature of her reply to us. I hope that this week’s post can serve as an apology to her memory, for the fact is that “No, it’s dark” is one of the best of the many lessons that she strove to teach us. This childhood memory has come back to me this week as I have been reflecting on, and attempting to digest, a story from the British press. Come with me, if you will, into the fantasy world that is woke Britain in the 2020s. In 2021, Carl Borg-Neal, a manager in Lloyds Bank, was attending an internal race education training session, held remotely, because of COVID. At the time, Borg-Neal was a mentor to three workers from varying backgrounds. At the beginning of the session, participants were encouraged to “speak freely” and to “learn and be clumsy”. During a discussion of “intent vs effect”, Borg-Neal “asked how he should handle a situation where he heard someone from an ethnic minority use a word that might be considered offensive if used by someone not within that minority. He was thinking partly about rap music.” The trainer did not immediately respond, and so Borg-Neal, seeking to clarify his question, added that the most common example was black people using the n-word. (For the benefit of anyone who has spent the last 50 years in Antarctica, the n-word rhymes with the name of Christopher Robin’s young big cat friend.) However, the problem wasn’t that Borg-Neal said “the n-word”; it was that he actually said the n-word. (And there are those who say punctuation isn’t really important.) At this point, the story becomes unreal. The trainer immediately attacked Borg-Neal verbally. A witness stated: “After saying at the beginning this would be a safe environment and it is acknowledged we may make mistakes, she launched into a vitriolic attack.”. Borg-Neal then immediately apologised for using the term. At this point, the story becomes surreal. Lloyds Bank conducted a racism investigation and ultimately dismissed Borg-Neal, who had been with the bank for 26 years, for gross misconduct. Borg-Neal sued Lloyds for unfair dismissal and disability discrimination. (He suffers from dyslexia, which, he claimed at the subsequent tribunal hearing, meant that he sometimes blurted things out without being able to monitor them beforehand.) Last week, the tribunal hearing ruled that the bank’s bosses unfairly sacked Borg-Neal, as while his use of the word had been “ill-judged”, there had been “no intention to cause hurt”. In its ruling, the tribunal also noted that the bank manager’s comment had involved a “well-intentioned relevant question”. At this point, you might be observing that, with the tribunal hearing’s ruling, good sense has prevailed. However, I have one more fact to add to this account: the fact that leaves the unreal and the surreal gasping in its wake. Come with me into the world of the mind-bogglingly can’t possibly be real. The trainer conducting the session was so distressed after Borg-Neal said the n-word that she went on five days’ leave to recover. Let me say that again, lest you think you misheard: The trainer conducting the session was so distressed after Borg-Neal said the n-word that she went on five days’ leave to recover. I know! I had to read it twice, as well. I’m really not sure where to start. The trainer was, presumably, deemed qualified to give this training, which, you will remember, encouraged participants to “speak freely and to “learn and be clumsy”, an environment in which it was accepted that participants might “make mistakes”. What are we to make of the fact that such a qualified trainer was so affected by the use, in a theoretical, illustrative, abstract, academic, unthreatening context and in a virtual medium, of the n-word, that it was five full days before she was sufficiently recovered to return to work? What kind of an upbringing and education has someone had if, as an adult professional, they take five days to recover from hearing a word spoken online? Any word? The answer to that question, I would suggest, is an upbringing in which nobody ever pointed out that the world isn’t (always) fair; it’s (at least sometimes) dark. There is no guarantee never to be surprised, disappointed, made to feel uneasy. Life, unavoidably, means risking exposure to ideas that you may not agree with, situations you may not be comfortable with. The world does not revolve around you, nor should it. Any upbringing that seeks to ‘protect’ you from exposure to the challenges that life poses ends up ensuring that, when you are eventually exposed to them, as you inevitably will be, you will be unable to cope. You will, rather, need to take five days off work to recover from hearing the n-word spoken online. (No: it doesn’t matter how many times I write that; it still makes no sense.) Of course, there is a balance to be struck here between leaving a newborn child to survive the elements unaided and smothering a child in cotton wool. It is possible to argue about the appropriate age for a child to start learning the meaning of the word “No”; it is not, I would suggest, possible to argue about whether it is a parent’s responsibility to ensure that a child does learn the meaning of the word. These days one hears very little about the ‘school of hard knocks’. It is hard to imagine a modern popular song recommending that you ‘pick yourself up, dust yourself down, and start all over again.’ Things were different when I was a boy, and things were very, very different for my parents’ generation. I have, for the last couple of years, been transcribing and annotating my father’s many letters to my mother during the Second World War. They met and became friends immediately before the War. After my father was called up in October 1939, and until several months after his evacuation from France as part of the British Expeditionary Force, there was, it seems, no contact between them. (In fairness, he had other things occupying his time and his mind.) As soon as my father, now stationed in the UK, did renew contact with my mother in July 1940, their relationship grew closer, fed over the next 18 months by very regular correspondence, occasional phone calls, and even more occasional leaves spent by my father in London. In December 1941 they decided to become engaged. However, they did not announce their engagement then and, in early January 1942, Dad was shipped with his regiment to India. It was exactly a year before they ‘went public’ with their engagement. The next time Dad saw Mum was a few days before their wedding, after he had disembarked in Britain after the voyage back from India, in August 1945. During the war years, Mum had been living through the blitz in London and then serving in the ATS (the Auxilliary Territorial Service, a branch of the armed forces for women) as a secretary. At the start of the war, Mum was 19 and Dad was a few months short of 21. By the time they were able to marry, Mum was 25 and Dad was a few months short of 27. The phrase ‘the best years of their lives’ comes to mind. Those years were basically stolen by the war. I am not making any special pleading for my parents; their experience was, I suspect, stereotypical of their entire generation. My point is that, having lived through those years, they were wonderfully well equipped both to embrace the opportunities, even relatively modest ones, that later life gave them; they cherished the opportunity they were given to share over 50 years of married life together; and they were well able to deal uncomplainingly with both the grind of daily routine and the challenges and hardships that life from time to time threw at them. Bernice and I recognised long ago that that entire generation in Britain acquired, through their wartime experiences, a resilience and inner strength that equipped them to face whatever life threw at them later. Judged objectively, Bernice’s mother had a very tough life, but nobody ever saw her without a smile on her face and a concern for everybody else. And now, almost 70 years later, people need five days off work to recover from hearing the n-word in an unthreatening environment, online. In Israel, I am happy to say, this lunacy has, as yet, not taken hold as it seems to have done in the UK and the US. I suspect that the very real threat of the existential and internal challenges facing the country helps us all to keep a better sense of perspective. Yet another good reason to live here. Meanwhile, here are three young men  who seem to be coping well with life’s challenges. Raphael is settling in to his new life in gan. Tao thoroughly enjoyed the puppet theatre at his summer activity, and he and Ollie are learning all about brothers sharing. (Of course, it’s not difficult if you’re the one whose big brother agrees to share his sunglasses with you!)