WITH reference to Penny Faust’s comment entitled: “How annual holidays went from unthinkable to a God-given right”, I should have thought that the whole point of the article was that official, mandatory yearly vacations (which not everyone, even in our neck of the woods, enjoys, of course) were anything but a divine present.

I was also somewhat puzzled by presumably her own remark: “There is nothing particularly logical about dividing up the days as we do; the seven day week is found nowhere in the natural world.”

Apart from the fact, that is, that this concept corresponds fairly accurately to each of the four not entirely illogical lunar phases which few would consider particularly unnatural.

This phenomenon was around long before religion existed and will probably still be long after it and we have ceased to be on this orb – our spherical, stabilising satellite being more than a pretty face.

Furthermore, Penny Faust’s observation: “When most people were involved in agricultural work, they benefited from the annual cycle that gave several breaks from work” suggests that they were very “thinkable”, whether or not “God-given”, until the advent of the Industrial Revolution, having simply been artificially revived.

Finally, I have never quite understood why an omnipotent god would need to take a break after a few days creating, but that is a rather different matter.

DAVID DIMENT
Riverside Court, Oxford