How many days and weeks until March 23rd?

At half past eight on the evening of March 23rd 2020 the prime minister addressed the country from Downing Street and told it to stay at home. Some twenty-seven million people watched, the largest British television audience for years. The legal regulations giving the instruction force did not come into effect until three days later, a gap that lawyers picked over for years afterwards. Schools had already closed the previous Friday.

Roger Bannister was born in Harrow on March 23rd 1929. As a medical student he trained in his lunch hours, and on a windy evening at Iffley Road in Oxford in May 1954 he ran a mile in three minutes 59.4 seconds. He always maintained that his work in neurology mattered more, and few people ever agreed with him.

On the night of March 23rd 1998, Los Angeles time, Titanic won eleven Academy Awards, equalling the record set by Ben-Hur. It was the most expensive film made to that point, and for twelve years the highest-grossing.

Akira Kurosawa trained as a painter before he went anywhere near a camera, and in later years, when the money for shooting was slow to arrive, storyboarded whole films in watercolour instead. He was born on March 23rd 1910, the rocket engineer Wernher von Braun, who led the development of the Saturn V rocket, in 1912, and the singer Chaka Khan, celebrated for her funk and soul recordings, in 1953.

Born on March 23rd: star sign, birthstone and birth flower

Roger Bannister and Akira Kurosawa — 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 March 23rd birthday

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

March birthstone necklace

A simple pendant in the actual March birthstone colour, from a long-running UK jewellery brand.

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Aries constellation necklace

Stainless steel, sign selectable at checkout — choose Aries for a March 23rd birthday.

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Personalised birth flower & birthstone disc

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

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Personalised star map print

The actual night sky over a chosen place on March 23rd, whichever year — a print rather than jewellery.

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