Doesn't  time fly when you’re having fun? September has only just started and the shops are stocking diaries for 2015. Where did the last year go?

It seems like only eight months since January. Oh, wait a minute, it IS only eight months since January. So who needs next year’s diary so soon?

Before you know it, there will be cream eggs in the shops for Easter.

Commerce dictates the seasons and the year gets condensed and apportioned according to retail prospects in an ever increasing cycle.

Take Halloween. I wish someone would.

People are bullied into buying pumpkins and costumes to celebrate a festival that only arrived here from America in 1978, via a horror film in which Jamie Lee Curtis tried to avoid a serial killer.

Now the season lasts for weeks.

In the recent past, Halloween was Mischief Night, no one dressed up and youngsters rang doorbells and ran away. How soon before we start observing other manufactured celebrations?

I sometimes think everyone has gone mad and wouldn’t be surprised if the major retailers of the western world didn’t suggest a shortened year, so they could bounce from one sales pitch to the next, without having to put up with the normality of life in between.

We could have Christmas, New Year, January Sales, Easter, Summer Holidays, Halloween and Bonfire Night, all evenly spaced through six months instead of 12.

There is even precedence.

Britain lost 11 days back in 1752 when Pope Gregory imposed his own calendar on the old one that had been out by 11 minutes a year since 46 BC.

Easily done, in the days before Timex. So September 2nd was followed by September 14th. And did the great unwashed complain? Actually, they did.

“Give us back our 11 days,” they shouted. Many thought they had been robbed of 11 days of life. The more pragmatic worried they would lose 11 days pay.

I’m sure today’s advertising executives could sell a six month year much better with the power of TV. Ant and Dec’s I’m A Celebrity would be on twice as often, the football season would end one week and start again the next, holidays and birthdays would come round quicker, and Dawn French and Churchill the Dog could emphasise how annual insurance costs had dropped by half.

Sound like a plan?

As long as they don’t augment it next year. I’ve already bought my diary for 2015.