Damn you, Mr Willett!
It's that time of year again when British Summer Time has just ended and everyone in the UK has had to set all their clocks back an hour to revert to Greenwich Mean Time. Every time this happens, I wonder at the point of it all as it takes an enormous amount of effort to give no apparent benefit. It is a procedure that could so easily be done away with, and it only takes one person forgetting to throw things into disarray, yet it has existed for almost a century and seems to be accepted as a fact of life and rarely questioned. The arguments against the practice clearly outweigh those in favour of it, and as a means of saving money its abolition is much less controversial than many of the government's other proposals, so I can't understand why we continue to abide by this antiquated and irrelevant tradition without questioning its real purpose.
When national time was first introduced with the coming of the railways, we managed perfectly well without BST until the idea was proposed by a William Willett in the early 20th century to avoid what he called the "waste of daylight" in the mornings, but ironically Willett never actually saw the consequences of his vision and the monster he created as it became law in 1916, the year after he died. His proposal surely missed an obvious and much simpler solution to the same problem: instead of physically changing the time, which is supposed to be a scientific constant and a standard by which other things are measured, why not just do things earlier in the winter to correspond with daylight hours, for example working from 8am to 4pm instead of 9 to 5?
The benefit of farmers and their animals has so often been used as a justification for changing the clocks, but this claim is frankly mind-boggling in its absurdity. The measuring of time in hours is a purely human concept that animals have no understanding of whatsoever, as they measure their days simply by the passage of the sun, and a cow is unlikely to object if it is fed at 6am instead of 7am! The physical act of changing the clocks must cost thousands of pounds and man-hours, and something that sticks in my mind is a quote regarding London Transport, who were responsible for a huge number of public clocks in bus and railway stations all over the capital. For two nights every year. they had to hire in a whole army of extra staff and vehicles at vast cost just to visit all their premises and change the clocks, as missing just one could cause travel chaos the next morning. How can anyone justify that as an efficient use of resources?
One o'clock in the morning is hardly the most convenient time to make the change either, as many people are likely to be fast asleep at that time. That means either changing the clocks on Saturday evening and being confused by the early changeover or waiting until the morning with a higher chance of forgetting to do it. So many devices have clocks these days (microwaves, ovens, washing machines, cameras, to name just a few examples that you might not immediately think of) that the average household contains numerous clocks and there is always one that gets forgotten and is discovered weeks later still showing the wrong time. For some inexplicable reason, many digital clocks only allow the time to be incremented so it isn't possible to simply step back an hour, but instead you have to go forward 23 hours in winter, which can involve pressing the button up to 23 times. All this means we don't really gain any time at all as the extra hour is spent changing the clocks!
As the time change doesn't take place on a fixed date, but on the last Sundays of March and October, it is not easy to remember from year to year exactly when it occurs, and huge amounts of unnecessary time and effort must be spent on reminding people to change their clocks at the right time. Pretty much everything in life is governed by time, so there is a total reliance on every single one of the millions of people in the country having to remember to make the change, and on a purely scientific basis time should be a constant that never changes. After so many changes of the clocks, how can we be absolutely certain that 2am on the last Sunday of October really is the time it claims to be? If there is no certainty in time, surely there can be no certainty to anything in life!
Apart from the practical issues, I feel certain that changing the clocks must also have negative psychological and physiological effects on the human body and mind. Certainly it usually takes me around a week to adjust to the time change, which is akin to jet-lag but without the excitement of being in another country, and a friend created a brilliant word to describe this phenomenon: 'acchronotisation', which is similar to acclimatisation but pertaining to time rather than climate. In the winter, it is still dark when many commuters leave home in the morning and pitch black when they finish work, so all of their leisure time during the week is spent in darkness and the change of time doesn't provide any benefit. At least my office had windows as those who work in windowless rooms could easily go through the entire working week without seeing daylight at all, which cannot be healthy for the human body that relies so much on exposure to sunlight in order to function properly.
There have been several parliamentary debates on the subject in recent years but no conclusion has been reached so the status quo remains. One serious proposal is to adopt a 'double summer time', which would mean Britain being permanently ahead of GMT, by one hour in the winter and two in the summer, but surely this just unnecessarily complicates matters even further and creates the bizarre and confusing situation where Greenwich is no longer in the time zone to which it gave its name! A much simpler option would be the abolition of BST completely so the country runs on GMT all year round, with the introduction of flexible working time to correspond with the available daylight hours. This would completely eliminate all of the practical and psychological problems surrounding the changing of the clocks that affect the entire population, and instead only a subset would be required to remember to do certain things an hour earlier in winter, which has to be easier than resetting every single clock in the country twice a year. At least you now know who to blame: damn you, Mr Willett, and your stupid idea a century ago.
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