Skip to main content

Time to reconsider British Summer Time

Happy 99th birthday, BST!

Being confused as to whether your clock should spring forwards or fall backwards is nothing new, but why do it at all?

Last weekend saw the clocks go forward by an hour, depriving us of one forty-eighth of our weekend, and ensuring a sizeable percentage of the UK’s oven clocks are now wrong for the next six months.

We’ve been fiddling about with our time in a non-Doctor Who kind of way for almost a century, and since 1995 have agreed that, along with straight bananas, all of Europe does exactly the same thing at the same point. You say tom-AY-toes, I say Central European Summer Time.

When William Willet suggested the complex idea of moving the clocks forward by 80 minutes in 20 minute Sunday increments during April, he was presumably unaware that his impending demise would mean he never got to see the benefits of extra light in the evenings. Much of this would probably have been lost resetting all the clocks though, so what we finally got was a 60 minute jump forward on the 21st of May 1916.

During the Second World War, clocks weren’t put back at the end of Summer Time 1940, but still advanced the following year, leading to five years of British Double Summer Time, and a nasty shock in the Autumn of ’45, when 2 hours extra sleep also meant it got dark startlingly early.

The late ‘50s saw an inquiry showing a slight preference for sticking with GMT+1 for good, and was followed by an experiment trying just that between 1968 and 1971.

During this period, the often-cited increase in casualties in the morning was greatly outnumbered by the lesser-mentioned decrease of evening incidents. Winning argument, right? Sadly not – drink-driving legislation was introduced during the same period, muddying the results.

There are even campaigns suggesting that we stick with BST for good, but go forward another hour in the spring and back in the autumn – the complicatedly-titled Single/Double Summer Time. Proponents argue that the reduction in accidents would be accompanied by huge energy savings and a corresponding reduction in CO2 emissions.

Concerns are voiced by some outdoor workers, and lots of our Scots/Northern Irish chums, who rightly point out that winter sunrises at 10am probably aren’t great, although many of the National Farmers Union’s members aren’t unhappy with the idea of permanent BST.

Another suggestion is to just stay on GMT, and shift business and school hours instead. Arguments also exist for Scotland and Northern Ireland to do whatever they fancy, whilst England and Wales tiddle about with their clocks separately.

I happen to like the lighter evenings a lot, but should we play Timelords, or is all this clocking about just a waste of time?

I suspect the only reason we still have the clocks go forward in Spring is to ensure we have an extra hour of daylight in which to look out of the window and complain about how terrible the weather is.

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 3rd of April 2015. You can view the edited version the paper used on their website here where it was retitled as "Time to think again on BST".

A particularly hard edit took place this week, with around 10% of my submitted words being cut. The whole section about Willet dying before BST was introduced went, along with the NFU line, and the 'clocking about' joke.

(More CD singles... currently The Braids, and their version of Bohemian Rhapsody.)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

Unstable Stables: Throw away the key

It’s comforting to know that there is one less threat to the people of Cumbria this week, following the conviction of white supremacist, Ethan Stables. The 20 year old from Barrow had planned to attack the town’s New Empire pub in June 2017, in the midst of a gay pride event. Despite social media posts saying he was “going to war” and planning to “slaughter”, online searches about how to make bombs and chemical poisons, and expressing hatred of Muslims, Jews and gay people, he claimed his online comments were merely to impress far-right friends. Fortunately, following Facebook posts about his intentions, the police were tipped off and armed officers intercepted him as he headed towards the pub. His aim was to kill anyone he found, with a machete. In a bizarre slip-up, Stables had erroneously added an innocent woman to his neo-Nazi Facebook group. When he vented his outrage at the Furness LGBT support group’s event, the shocked woman contacted the authorities. He’ll have ple...

Is it foggy? No.

When I get put in charge (which is bound to happen soon), I'm going to introduce a whole raft of new laws, for I shall be a just and fair ruler. I'm quite liking the title of 'Most Marvellous Emperor Of Sensible Regulations And Bountiful Lovingness Not To Mention Exceedingly Handsome', but it might be a bit long. On that basis, I'll settle for the more informal 'He Who Is Smashing' from my loyal subjects. Anyway, I digress. I do that sometimes - had you noticed? Here, then, is the first law that will introduced: grumpyf1 law No.1 - Turn your fog lights off, you complete git. Don't get me wrong; If it genuinely is foggy, fog lights are quite handy. The reason for introduction of this law is because 96% of the time (based on my own in-depth research) it isn't foggy when some utter cockwomble blinds you. This has always been a bit of a problem but in the last couple of years it seems to have escalated out of control, possibly because of the...