Personally I love July; for days out anyway. It’s certainly not my favourite month to be stuck in the office, especially when the air conditioning stops working and you have to wait two days for people to come and and fix it, because in Cyprus, “I’ll be round tomorrow morning actually means I’ll be round when I can be bothered, which luckily for you was in two days.”
Sorry, as I was saying I do love July. It’s a hot month, with temperatures that don’t quite always reach the heat wave level that we have at the beginning of August. The World Cup finishes in July and everyone I’m sure will be glued to the TV, but what other fascinating history has occurred this month over the years.
The month of July originally was named by the Roman Senate in honour of Julius Caeser for reforming their calendar, which at the time was unbelievably erratic, with the months changing place every year. In fact, at the time, January had started to fall in…well…Fall. Imagine an autumnal January… Not only that, but the high priest in charge of the calendar had become so corrupt that he was taking money to extend the year to keep certain officials in office longer, and was taking money to make enemies’ terms shorter.
In History, July saw British Scientist Charles Darwin present a paper to the Linnean Society in London, on his theories of the evolution of species and natural selection, in 1838.
Parents should be thankful for July because on 13th July, 1923, the British Government passed a law that deemed the selling of alcohol to Under-18s to be illegal. It’s certainly a law that has sparked much debate over the years and the enforcement of this law is a bit skeptical at best, but July is when it first started.
Another of the most discussed events in history is the landing of the Eagle on the moon on 20th July 1969 and Neil Armstrong then being the first man to step on its lunar surface. “The Eagle has landed” is a famous saying that most people will be aware of, and soon after, Neil Armstrong became the first man to step on the moon six hours after landing and with only a minute of fuel left. Televised to Earth and seen by millions of people, the commander of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module stepped onto the moon, soon accompanied by Edwin E. Aldrin. The two astronauts spent 21 hours on the lunar surface and returned to Earth with 46 pounds of lunar rock. It was a day that everyone alive at the time remembers, and really is a monumental date in history.