The clocks have changed, and I am confused. It'll wear off in a couple of days, as I get used to the idea that it is now dark by five o'clock, but the immediate effect is disorientating, and rather depressing. Only three hours of gardening time left after lunch.
I have always struggled with the terminology of when the clocks go forward, and when they go back. There is a mnemonic, Spring Forward, Fall Back, but I've never found it in the least helpful. Instead I remember that back in my student days, a school friend and I were late to lunch with a friend of hers the day after we'd been to see the boat race, because we'd forgotten that the clocks changed. The boat race is in the spring, ergo, the spring change means that lunch comes sooner than you were expecting, so the autumn change must mean that it will be later.
Nowadays there is practically no excuse not to know what time it is, because virtually every digital device you possess will tell you, and most of us have several. Even our kitchen clock knows the time, and resets itself at some point during the night (though I've never stayed up to watch the hands go round. Maybe we could film it on the Systems Administrator's trail camera. I don't know why, but I've a fancy to see it). I calibrate myself through the day with reference to what's on the radio (so on Sunday mornings I like to know when it's ten o'clock so that I can tune in to Pienaar's Politics on Radio 5) and was vaguely confused when the clock on my digital gardening radio said that it was still only half past eight, and not half past nine.
The SA is firm that we should switch to the new time on day one and get used to it, not fiddle around moving meals in half hour increments as we adjust, and on that basis took the full extra hour in bed. My elderly clock radio does not keep track of the correct time by itself (which is a nuisance as each time there's any interruption to the mains power supply it starts flashing a random time) and even though I knew when I got up that the clocks had changed and it was not really twenty to eight, I still had to think about it when I went downstairs and the kitchen clock said that it was eight minutes past seven.
Daylight will soon be so short that it'll be easy to be outside while it's light, whatever time the clocks say it is, so it doesn't really make any difference to my daily life. I remember, though, how I used to wish when I worked in an office that the evenings could be lighter. Double summer time would have been marvellous. It was so frustrating to sit on the train on a beautiful evening, convincing myself that I'd get at least half an hour in the garden, only for the train to be delayed, or reality to strike, and dusk to be drawing in by the time I finally got home. I'd have willingly accepted darker mornings, when all I was doing anyway was going to work, in return for lighter evenings, so that I could get outside, and I suspect I was in the majority. Gardening, a whizz round the neighbourhood on your bike if you're a kid, a game of football or tennis (not for me, thank you, but some people like it), or just a chance to sit down outside with the rays of the evening sun on your face. Light evenings, bring them on.
In the meantime, how can it possibly be so dark at half past six?
No comments:
Post a Comment