David McKie

The food mogul HJ Heinz built his company’s reputation on the claim that it offered 57 varieties. In one of those trailers with which kindly BBC Radio 4 decorates the listener’s day, it was said that Heinz was asked why he chose 57.

Why, because, he explained, 57 had an air about it that 58 or 59 could never have matched. It would take a conference of brand consultants, numerologists, philologists, psychologists, poets and mystics a week to explain why HJ was right; yet that he was right is surely indisputable.

For the number seven has a powerful allure which mere eights cannot match. Our world is infested with lists of seven, far more so than lists of eights and nines, and more even perhaps

than threes, though they are a powerful assembly too — especially in religions: even the earliest religions had defining notions of trinities.

The life of man, according to William Shakespeare, has seven ages, and though St Augustine taught that the life of the world was divisible into six phases, there were really seven involved in this calculation, since the last was the end of the world.

We still talk of the seven seas, though the Middle Ages, which made that concept familiar, knew there were more, and in the United Kingdom we usually score seven continents, though much of the world prefers six, and parts of it five or four.

There might have been eight or nine wonders of the world, but significantly those who devised the collection preferred to have seven instead of eight or nine.

The recent appearance of the Hollywood actor Will Smith’s Seven Pounds — not, to judge by reviews so far, that auspicious a title — further expands an impressive list of films involving allureful seven (or in one case, Se7en): the Seven Samurai, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers,

Seven Days to Noon, would not have quite the same tingle about them if you substituted an eight.

After all, the fact that a week lasts seven days is one of the inescapable rhythms of daily life, and that applies whether or not you believe that God created the world in seven days (or more precisely, six days for creation and one for rest and recuperation).