How many days and weeks until September 10th?

At about a quarter to one in the morning on September 10th 1897, a twenty-five-year-old London cab driver named George Smith took his electric taxi from one side of the road to the other, across the footway and into the front of 165 New Bond Street. He told the constable he had had two or three glasses of beer. He is generally reckoned the first person anywhere to be charged with drink-driving, and Britain would not fix a legal blood-alcohol limit for another seventy years.

The Large Hadron Collider circulated its first beam on September 10th 2008, twenty-seven kilometres round under the Franco-Swiss border. Nine days later it broke down expensively, took more than a year to repair, and in 2012 found the Higgs boson.

On September 10th 1960 Abebe Bikila of Ethiopia won the Olympic marathon in Rome, running barefoot on the cobbles and making his decisive break beside the Obelisk of Axum, which Italian troops had carried off from his country twenty-three years earlier.

Arnold Palmer’s father was the greenkeeper and then the professional at a Pennsylvania club where the son was not allowed in the clubhouse, which is one explanation for the crowds that followed him everywhere afterwards. He was born on September 10th 1929. Colin Firth, the actor best remembered for playing buttoned-up Englishmen on screen, not least Mr Darcy, was born at Grayshott in Hampshire in 1960, and Guy Ritchie, the director known for his stylised British gangster films, in 1968.

Born on September 10th: star sign, birthstone and birth flower

Colin Firth and Guy Ritchie — 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 September 10th birthday

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

September birthstone necklace

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

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Virgo constellation necklace

Stainless steel, sign selectable at checkout — choose Virgo for a September 10th birthday.

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Personalised birth flower & birthstone disc

Engraved with a name, the September birthstone and the aster — 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 September 10th, whichever year — a print rather than jewellery.

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