If you go down to Dublin zoo tomorrow, be careful - you may get more thanyou bargained for, writes Rosita Boland.
If you are in Dublin Zoo tomorrow at 3 p.m., you may well see someone making a right monkey of themselves. Or giraffe. Or rhino. Some lucky - or unlucky - bloke, depending on your perspective, will be receiving a proposal of marriage in front of the enclosure of animals which his partner most associates him with. The woman proposing will have won a €1,500 diamond ring from Appleby Jewellers, as part of a competition run by Dublin Zoo.
Hello, hello? Is Valentine's day not over? What's with the ring thing? In case it may have escaped your attention, tomorrow is a day that only comes round one year in four: February 29th, Leap Year.
Our calendar year contains 365 days - most of the time. It actually takes the earth 365 days, five hours, 48 minutes and 45 seconds to complete its annual journey around the sun. Once every four years, an extra day is tacked on to February to accommodate all these stray hours, minutes and seconds. It's thought that the term 'Leap Year' comes from the fact that this additional day did not have legal status in the old English courts. February 29th was thus "leaped over" in the records, and whatever happened on that day was dated as February 28th.
A stray day in the calendar is a marvellous glory hole, into which customs can be stored, forgotten about, then taken out every four years. Chief among these is a tradition which could fill many a male heart tomorrow with trepidation: the custom which encourages women to ask their partner to marry them in a leap year.
Are you listening, men of Ireland? If this potential scenario makes you happy, fantastic! However, if not, you do have an out-clause. Tradition dictates that if you turn her down you only have to buy a silk dress or a pair of gloves by way of compensation. (Note to sartorial ignoramuses: gloves are slightly cheaper.)
Meanwhile, back to the zoo. Too late to enter now, but Dublin Zoo has been looking for submissions from women for Leap Year proposals. The carrot - all 18 of them - is a gold 18-carat three-diamond ring. The winner gets to use it to propose to her man in the Zoo tomorrow. Ethel Power, commercial director of Dublin Zoo, confirmed this week that 137 women had sent in entries, in which they were invited, in 30 words, to describe the similarities between the man in their life and an animal in the Zoo. Forget comparing your love to a summer rose. The entry form made the following suggestions (including exclamation marks):
"Tiger - A one night stand! Red River Hog - fond of foreplay! Sulawesi Macaque - the unfaithful and immoral male! Siamang Gibbon - wolf whistling is essential! Gorilla - size really doesn't matter!" It also invited entrants to be "as graphic as you want". Apparently, the majority of the 137 women indeed embraced to their beating hearts this invitation. They ignored the 30-word-count restriction (what happened to rules being rules?) and wrote several pages apiece. Graphic humour was the order of the day. The animal that turned up most often in entries was the rhino. Why?
"Well, ummm, the rhino entries tended to be the more racy ones," as Power delicately puts it.
One person who almost entered the competition, as she was considering asking her partner to marry her, but didn't in the end, is Siobhán (33), an IT consultant in Cork. She had chosen a leopard, because her partner "likes to run fast". She doesn't say from what.
"In the end, I lost my nerve," she confesses. "I am a very practical person and I'd be all, 'Isn't it time we got married', but my partner is very romantic and I think he'd like to do things differently. I don't mind the fact that it's the man who is meant to ask. The man asks, but the woman makes the decision. It's like a dance, but it seems to work."
The other thing about February 29th, is, of course, birthdays. If you're one of an estimated 165 Leap Year babies due to be born tomorrow, the Government will be giving you a one-off payment of €100. The Government says it's to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the International year of the Family, but the babies will soon find out it's really to soften the blow of having only one proper birthday every four years.
Dubliner Emer Martin, a novelist now living in San Francisco, will be 36 tomorrow. Or, rather, she'll be nine, by the Leap Year birthday calendar. "I used to feel terrible resentment towards the Bank of Ireland as a child, because our calendars at home came from there every year, and my birthday wasn't on it," she relates. "My sister and brother's birthdays would be there, and I'd be looking for mine. Nothing! I thought it was all the bank's fault I didn't have a birthday; I thought that they invented the calendar.
"I used to get very upset about a Leap Year birthday as a child. For my eighth birthday, all these people turned up for my party with cards that said, 'I Am Two'; baby cards. I didn't like that at all. Nowadays, I love having a Leap Year birthday. I go around all February, saying 'this is my birthday month'. I milk it for the whole month, and sometimes well into March too. And when I'm 84, I'll really be only 21."