As a child I was confused by the concept of a leap year. In my mind it was muddled with the 'Twelve Days of Christmas' and the ten energetic lords a-leaping. In my infantile imagination, leap year took off in a great bound. But where to, I had no idea. People did not bother to explain the arithmetical point.
My grandmothers added to the muddle by explaining that the leap year was very important for women. As it was unthinkable that women should propose marriage to men, this was women's only opportunity: every four years, on 29 February, they could broach the subject with the man of their choice.
But what happened if the man did not want to marry? 'Ah,' intoned the grannies from the height of their infinite wisdom, 'of course, any gentleman had to behave with the utmost courtesy and not hurt any lady's feelings. And so it was mandatory to present the rejected person with a pair of white gloves.'
I imagined serried ranks of desperate females, and hoped that shopkeepers bore a possible glove shortage in mind, and that confirmed bachelors were well-equipped.
And now I think that in many places around the world, women propose to men on St Valentine's Day or whenever they like, and that white gloves are never a consideration.
Proposals involving human hearts and the making of a very necessary apology were made to John Howard by indigenous and white Australians over many years, and were always rejected. Howard saw no need to issue white gloves, either. Black mourning gloves would have been more appropriate, anyway.
Howard's own gloves seemed to be well and truly off. They still are: he was the only living PM to stay away on Sorry Day. But perhaps the resultant earthquake of astonishment would have been off the Richter scale if he had attended.
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I eventually got my head around the concept of leap year, but it continues to exert a fascination. The Ethiopian ecclesiastical calendar, for example, assigns each of the four years to one of the Apostles, so that a leap year belongs to St Luke.
I eventually learned about the Chinese Great Leap Forward. Like many of my contemporaries, I often used the phrase as a metaphor for various decisive and usually unscheduled steps in my own life. And then came Neil Armstrong ...
I was in Kalamata, Greece, when Australia