all change

I woke up this morning, and wondered why I felt so little like getting up when it was eight o'clock and the Systems Administrator was already out of bed.  Then I remembered that the clocks changed last night, and that my bedside digital clock radio had already helpfully reset itself.  The kitchen clock speaks to a remote transmitter that tells it what time it is, so that had changed to the new time before I got down to breakfast.  It's probably just as well they know, since I always struggle to remember whether everything gets earlier or later when the clocks change in March, and again in October.  A friend said it was easy, just remember Spring forward and Fall back, but I never found that helped very much.  My best guide is the memory of how as a student I went with a friend to watch the boat race, and the next day we were due to go to lunch with friends of hers and were late.  So the Sunday after the boat race everything is earlier than your stomach or Saturday's setting of your watch tell you it ought to be.

It's handy because the clock in my car is now only one minute fast instead of an hour and a minute.  To alter the time on the clock you have to turn a tiny plastic knob, one way to advance the hours and the other for the minutes.  I can never remember whether clockwise or anticlockwise does the hours, and since if you forget and add a minute you then have to scroll through the other fifty-nine of them to get back to where they ought to be, and it is a very tiny and fiddly knob, it is easier just to leave the clock unaltered and make a mental adjustment in the winter months.

I reset my gardening watch because I wore it today, but not my tidy watch or my other gardening watch.  Scope for confusion lies ahead.  I suppose young people do not have to worry about these things because they tell the time from their phones.