Making up for lost time…

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The clocks went forward yesterday.

Apparently we have William Willet, a London builder, to blame for the whole ‘clocks going forward’ (and back) thing. In 1907 he circulated a pamphlet to dozens of MP’s, town councils, businesses, and any other organisation that he could think of, complaining that for nearly half the year the sun shines for several hours each day while we are asleep. He got into a real tizz about it – except without the zz’s because he obviously didn’t like sleeping (sorry).

I can just imagine…

‘What a sinful waste of good building time - lazing around in bed whilst the sun is up…. how very outrageous! If God had meant us to sleep whilst the sun is shining then he’d have made us nocturnal, like bats, or badgers, or Whitechapel murderers… why… by the time the populace is out and about, I might have roofed a Baptist church, dug the foundations for a row of miner’s terraces, or maybe even added an orangerie to a wing at some manor or other… and all before the king (God bless him) has had his tea and kippers! I really must do something to set about changing this… now where did I put my ink and parchment?’

The American’s call it ‘Daylight Saving Time’ – which is very functionally descriptive but nowhere near as evocative as our ‘British Summer Time’. Ah yes, ‘British - Summer - Time’… I can almost hear the neighbour’s lawnmower, smell the barbeque smoke, and see the traffic jamming away into the smog clouded distance…

Willet’s original idea was to advance the clocks by twenty minutes on each of four Sundays in April (one hour and twenty minutes – an even earlier time to get up!), and reverse this on four Sundays in September. Imagine what a nightmare that would have been! Isn’t it* bad enough having to remember to change the clocks once, let alone having then to change them by twenty minutes for four consecutive weeks.

*Rambler’s corner - Isn’t… ‘isn’t it’ interesting? In full form it is ‘is not it’, rather than ‘is it not’… how very medieval, don’t you think?

A Parliamentary bill was introduced in 1909 but nobody took it seriously until the First World War when in April, 1916 Daylight Saving Time was introduced as a wartime measure not only in Britain, but in most (allied and non-allied – enemy?) countries. It was introduced as a ‘wartime measure of economy’. I’m not really sure what that means but my guess would be it was something to do with countryside things – haymaking, butter churning, bacon curing, scythe sharpening, mangel-wurzel mashing – that sort of thing. Or maybe it was just the bonkers bureaucrats in charge trying to make it that teensy bit harder for everyone - just in case trench warfare wasn’t enough.

I often wonder why William Willet didn’t just get up early, do his own thing, and leave everyone else alone. Why he had to drag the rest of the world into his enthusiasm for working every possible waking hour is beyond me – maybe being a zealot just ran in his family.

I don’t know about you, but I find the whole losing an hour thing very disorienting. For days after the clocks have changed I feel as if I’m slightly out of sync. Maybe it’s because I have a very accurate body clock - I usually know the time on waking to within a couple of minutes (no honestly) and it goes haywire when the clocks change…

… and the clocks don’t really ‘change’ at all do they? They are still the same clocks. Or does some nasty time bandit thing sneak in and change ‘our’ clocks for ‘their’ clocks, with all the implications that might entail if I only understood what ‘their clocks’ meant? I’m not paranoid; my Doctor has it on good authority.

… and what about that lost hour? Where does it go? Does it hang around waiting for our/their clocks to go back in the autumn so that it can slip itself back into time, or does it disappear into a vortex - whirling around and down into the darkness for all eternity, or maybe it just pops completely out of the time dimension with a ‘zipfphhh’??

… and what does go ‘back’ and ‘forward’ mean… is it something to do with time travel – and what if I meet myself coming from the other direction at the same time and the other me gets knocked over by a bus???

…stop! Stop! STOP! It is all too confusing… but where does that lost hour go? It has to go somewhere doesn’t it? Why is there never a Stephen Hawking around when you need one?

Maybe it just flies away.

Anyway, for once British Summer Time seems to have paid off – the clocks went forward, we lost an hour, and suddenly the sun came out and summer (or at least a promise of it) arrived. What a lovely sunny day yesterday was! I spent the afternoon on Criccieth Beach in the shadow of the castle, watching the sun sparkle on deep blue waves and the purple shadows of clouds rush across the sage green mountainside.

It was great, so relaxing. There was I in the sunshine, sitting on the knobbly pebble beach watching time pass, when - all of a sudden, there’s a rushing, thumping, beating noise above my head and that thing in the photograph lands not six feet from where I’m sitting. It proper shook me up I can tell thee.

What is it?

I don’t know. In my rush to get away from it I didn’t have time to ask… it was ticking though.