CLOCKS GO BACK TONIGHT - BUT WHAT’S THE POINT?
ICAN say, without anyone taking the slightest bit of notice of me, that the clocks will turn back one hour tonight. The return to Greenwich Meantime from British Summertime is the most unheeded event in the annual calendar.
So why do we have it, especially when most of the country is already locked under curfew?
My mate, comedian Pete Conway, summed it up – ‘as if we hadn’t got enough restrictions, now they’re giving us an extra hour of darkness!’
This odd ritual customarily takes place at 2am on the last Sunday in October, and that was last Sunday.
But curiously it didn’t happen!
It seems that some spectral office-holder of ‘Big Brother’ watchfulness, decided to further muddle the twice-annual oddity by shifting it on a week, reasoning that the change would be less disruptive for schools and businesses.
And to further confuse us, the charade will take place tonight, Saturday, and at midnight and not 2am!
Not that we’ll notice because e-technology does it for us by resetting pretty much everything we use while we sleep.
This single rule of law is absolutely outmoded. It serves no purpose whatsoever, and it should have been kicked into touch years ago.
Altering daylight hours to suit certain events was apparently common practice in the ancient world, designed by early civilisations whose lives were controlled by seasons.
Isaac Newton, in 1687, theorised that time is something we merely occupy, that it is only relative to measure objects in motion. As I understand it, a clock won’t age, but the person that winds it will. Einstein took it further with general relativity, but we won’t venture there for fear of even more confusion.
It’s worth mentioning, though, that in 1784 Benjamin Franklin published a highhearted satire suggesting time should be changed to make lazy people to get up.
But the key mover for change was a builder from Surrey, William Willett, who in 1907 published a pamphlet called ‘The Waste of Daylight’ proposing advancing the clocks by 80 minutes during summertime.
His suggestions were well received and supported by several Members of Parliament including a young Liberal MP, Winston Churchill.
Anyway, to get back to my point, British Summertime was enacted at the outbreak of the First World War primarily to save coal, following Germany’s lead for similar fuel-saving reasons.
The ‘gained’ hour of daylight complemented the 1914 Defence of the Realm Act which set the permitted hours of pubs, opening daily from 11am to 10pm with a break in the afternoon.
Mind-bogglingly, this farce remained in force until 1964 when open hours were extended to 11pm, and finally repealed in 2004.
It takes a national crisis to create authoritarian laws, which is why, under Covid-19 restrictions, we are turning back 100 years as we witness again 10 o’clock closing for pubs!
Over generations we have learned to accept changes to laws that very often fly in the face of societal as well as individual freedoms.
In reality, although we accept democratic governance as being a good thing, many observers believe that too much of our lives is regulated by rules left over from some previous critical event, outmoded stuff we never get around to repealing.
So, as we submit to more controlling regulation in the maw of the pandemic, lockdowns, curfews, and transgressions judged by how far and where you can travel, we have to make sure that restrictions are removed once they have served their purpose.
Emergency regulations are designed to fit occasions and events. To allow them to remain in force as we have done with British Summertime, will invite complacency and submission to autocratic rule.
Tomorrow we wake up to an extra hour of daylight. Life goes on. We adjust.
But to persist with this typically British idiosyncrasy is daft. It certainly has no place in today’s uncertain future.