‘30 days has September, April, June and November. All the rest has 31, except for February alone which has 28 days clear and 29 in each Leap Year.’

For the 0.068% of you born on February 29th, you should probably already know that your birthday doesn’t exist this year. Or the year after. Or the year after that. For you 0.068% (often referred to as Leapers), this is your badge of honour. Indeed, you Leapers can be heard boasting of your youthfulness, having only had five ‘real’ birthdays, and are therefore only 5 years old. It’s almost as trivial as saying your dog is 37 in dog years. I’m just not buying into that kind of spurious logic.

It can be said that your birthday is like that distant relative who goes off the radar, only to return with much fanfare for certain functions and dos, only to routinely disappear again. Why is your birthday the screwball uncle of your personal calendar? Let’s look at the science bit: it takes the Earth 365.245 days (that’s 365 days, 5 hours, 49 minutes, and 16 seconds) to circle around the Sun. Annoyingly, this solar year doesn’t quite match up with our Gregorian calendar year. Though the difference is only a couple of hours, were we to forgo this extra day every four years, things would get very messy altogether. So much so that in just 100 years the calendar year would be off by about 24 days! To make things even more complicated, the surplus hours left over from four standard years don’t quite add up to a full 24-hour day. This is compensated for by omitting three Leap Days every 400 years. But fear not, Leapers – this won’t happen again until 2100.

Of course, one cannot write an article about Leap Years without making reference to that bizarre Irish tradition associated with it: women proposing to men on a Leap Day. This tradition used to extend for an entire Leap Year, but I assume that men found 12 entire months of living in constant fear of commitment a wee bit traumatising. As a new twist on an old classic, I think we should shift this day to April 1st. That way, if you get shot down, you can always fall back on the old, ‘Gotcha! You should have seen your face…’ routine.
However, should your beloved indeed reject you, remember to take comfort in the knowledge that this tradition takes your feelings into great consideration. He can’t just walk away. Oh no. According to tradition, and as confirmed by my thorough research (i.e. a speedy Google search), the rejecter must first buy the rejectee 12 pairs of gloves, so you may hide your bare ring finger in style! Talk about a silver lining, eh ladies?

If you find yourself looking for valid reasons to avoid that looming assignment, why not see what we’re missing this year and check out some Leap Day related TV and films? If you can stomach the typical Hollywood’s interpretation of Irish culture, then give the ingeniously titled Leap Year a try, and prepare to be subjected to 100 minutes of startled cries of ‘Be-gorrah!’ and depictions of village idiots drunkenly driving clapped-out vans down Connemara by-roads. Or if, like me, you are a fan of Modern Family’s Phil Dunphy, check out his ‘Bonus Day’ theory.

I can’t help but be sceptical of Leap Year traditions and nuances. It is really nothing more than a solution to a mathematical problem, and, try as I might, it’s just too difficult to romanticise. Perhaps instead, they could give us an extra hour in bed a few nights of the year. As a part-time student/semi-professional napper, I would certainly appreciate that.