How many days and weeks until April 20th?

Oliver Cromwell attended a sitting of the Rump Parliament on April 20th 1653, stood up and told the members they were no Parliament, then called in a file of musketeers and had the chamber emptied. No text of what he said survives. The version everyone quotes — that they had sat too long for any good they had been doing, and should in the name of God go — was assembled by later compilers, and the celebrated instruction to take away the mace as a fool’s bauble comes from a chronicler writing seventy years after the event. He locked the doors and walked back to Whitehall.

Enoch Powell addressed a meeting of the Conservative Political Centre in Birmingham on April 20th 1968 and quoted Virgil on the Tiber foaming with much blood. He had told a friend beforehand that the speech would go up like a rocket and, unlike other rockets, would stay up. Edward Heath sacked him from the shadow cabinet the following evening. He never held office again.

The Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20th 2010, killing eleven men. The well ran for eighty-seven days before it was capped, and BP’s share price halved within seven weeks.

Adolf Hitler was born on April 20th 1889 at Braunau am Inn. The Spanish painter and sculptor Joan Miro was born in 1893, and Nicholas Lyndhurst — later familiar to television audiences as Rodney in Only Fools and Horses — in Gosport, in 1961.

Born on April 20th: star sign, birthstone and birth flower

Nicholas Lyndhurst and Jessica Lange — both named above — share this star sign with everyone else born in the same window.

None of this is settled fact in the way the history above is — zodiac dates, birthstones and birth flowers are conventions rather than laws, and different sources hedge them slightly differently. The birthstone is the most standardised of the three (set by the trade in 1912 and revised since); the birth flower is the least, resting on Victorian tradition rather than any governing body.

Gift ideas for a April 20th birthday

A small, themed starting point rather than a shopping list — diamond for the stone, Taurus for the sign, and the sky itself on the day.

Personalised birth flower & birthstone disc

Engraved with a name, the April birthstone and the daisy — both in one pendant, in a gift box.

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Taurus constellation necklace

Stainless steel, sign selectable at checkout — choose Taurus for a April 20th birthday.

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Personalised star map print

The actual night sky over a chosen place on April 20th, whichever year — a print rather than jewellery.

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