How many days and weeks until March 3rd?

On March 3rd 1985 a delegate conference of the National Union of Mineworkers voted by 98 to 91 to return to work with no agreement of any kind, ending a strike that had begun three days short of a year earlier. Pits went back the following Tuesday, many of them marching in behind colliery bands and lodge banners. Within fifteen years almost all of them had closed.

Pioneer 10 left Cape Canaveral late on March 2nd 1972, which by Greenwich time was already the 3rd. It was the first craft to cross the asteroid belt and the first to reach Jupiter, and it carries a gold-anodised plaque showing two human figures and the position of the Sun, on the slim chance that somebody eventually reads it.

Carmen had its first performance on March 3rd 1875 at the Opera-Comique in Paris, where the management thought the subject vulgar and the audience broadly agreed. Bizet died three months later, aged thirty-six, convinced he had written a failure. It is now among the most performed operas in the world.

Alexander Graham Bell, who would go on to patent the telephone, was born in Edinburgh on March 3rd 1847, seven days before the date on which his invention would first carry a human voice.

Born on March 3rd: star sign, birthstone and birth flower

Alexander Graham Bell and Jean Harlow — 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 3rd birthday

A small, themed starting point rather than a shopping list — bloodstone for the stone, Pisces 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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Pisces constellation necklace

Stainless steel, sign selectable at checkout — choose Pisces for a March 3rd 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 3rd, whichever year — a print rather than jewellery.

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