`What are days for?" asks Philip Larkin.
Days are where we live;
They are to be happy in.
Where can we live but days?
Some days, on the other hand, have achieved sufficient notoriety to be remembered by a special epithet.
One such, for example, was this day 130 years ago, when savage gales demolished many of the main buildings in Edinburgh to the extent the memory of the day lives on; January 24th, 1868, is immortal in that city as Windy Friday.
Also of Scottish origin is Black Saturday, August 4th, 1621. As the Edinburgh Parliament met that day to reimpose episcopal authority on Scotland, which apparently had waned, a violent storm - God-sent or not, we do not know - disrupted proceedings and the measure had to be postponed.
The dust-bowl years in the United States provide a Black Sunday. It was April 14th, 1935, on which day there occurred in northern Texas one of the worst dust-storms of that tragic era. A contemporary schoolboy provides the explanation for the name: "The storm was like rolling black smoke. We had the lights on all day, and went to school with the headlights on. I saw a woman who thought the world was coming to an end. She dropped on her knees in the middle of the main street in Amarillo, and prayed out loud: `Dear Lord, please give them another chance'."
Another American Sunday gained notoriety in quite a different way. There are several references in contemporary writings to the famous Hot Sunday of June 18th, 1749.
One Dr Edward Holyoke, for example, declared this day to have produced "the greatest heat known in this country at least for the last 40 years", while Benjamin Franklin noted that his thermometer climbed to an even 100 degrees Fahrenheit at Philadelphia on that day.
Black Monday was Easter Monday in 1360, on which day the army of Edward III of England was laying siege to Paris; it was so dark, windy and bitterly cold that many men and horses died. Hot Tuesday, on the other hand, was July 19th, 1707, so called because of the many deaths from excessive heat in southern Britain. And Hot Wednesday, July 13th, 1808, acquired its sobriquet for the same reason.
Heat, albeit in a different sense, is associated in Australia with both Black Thursday and Black Friday, February 6th, 1851, and January 13th, 1939, respectively. Both were days on which bush fires, sweeping through the woodlands of the state of Victoria, reached their peak with horrifying loss of life.