Changing Time

There’s something faintly heroic about the country twice a year deciding, in unison, to fiddle with every clock it owns as if this will somehow improve matters. A sort of national ritual. Like bleeding a radiator, but for time itself.

Now, I appreciate that in 1916, when the country was trying to squeeze every ounce of usefulness out of daylight, coal and factory hours, shifting the clocks probably felt like a clever wheeze. More light for work, less waste, Germany possibly annoyed. Very brisk. Very purposeful.

But here we are, a century later, and I find myself standing in the kitchen trying to remember how to reset the oven clock, which insists on blinking 00:00 like a small act of rebellion, while the car has updated itself automatically and now disagrees with the microwave. This, apparently, is modern efficiency.

The official line is that all this still suits the working population. You hear it said with the usual air of calm authority, as if nobody has looked out of the window in January. It allegedly moves daylight to where it is most useful. Which sounds splendid until you notice that, in winter, plenty of people still leave for work in darkness and come home in darkness, just with the gloom rearranged a bit.

That is the truth of it really. The clock change does not abolish winter darkness. Britain in winter simply has a limited supply of daylight and no amount of ministerial fiddling is going to change that. All we are doing is deciding which end of the day gets to be slightly less depressing.

We are told it helps children going to school, and fair enough, there is at least a proper argument there. If we kept summer time all year, sunrise in some parts would drift so late that children would be setting off in something close to midnight with school bags. But let’s not pretend this is some elegant economic masterstroke. It is a dreary compromise with the Earth’s axis.

Then there is the claim that it gives workers more light after work. Yes, in the shoulder months it probably does. March and October get a mild lift. People can leave the office and still see a tree. Wonderful. But December carries on being December, entirely indifferent to our administrative tinkering. By then the day is already over by teatime and no amount of confidence from policy wonks alters that.

As for the old stuff about saving energy, that now feels like one of those arguments repeated mostly because nobody can be bothered to go back and fetch its coat. Lighting patterns have changed, heating habits have changed, daily life has changed. We are not all sitting in Edwardian parlours gasping with gratitude because the lamp stayed off for another forty minutes.

For retired people, of course, the whole thing takes on an extra layer of absurdity. My day is not ruled by a factory siren. If I want more morning light, I can get up later. If I want more evening light, I can go outside earlier. I do not need Parliament to perform surgery on the clock in order to help me identify lunchtime.

What I do get is a couple of days of feeling slightly out of joint, a house full of clocks holding different opinions, and the annual hunt for the one stubborn device that requires a sequence of button presses last seen in the cockpit of a Soviet submarine. Usually the oven. Always the oven.

And still we do it. Twice a year. Because we’ve always done it, because it sort of helps somebody somewhere, and because the country likes a bit of pointless faff so long as it comes wrapped in official language and mild inconvenience.

I’ll reset the oven later. Or I won’t. It’s only time, after all.