I’m not the only one whose diurnal rhythms are seriously messed up for a few days twice a year by the switch to British Summer Time (last weekend) and back again (due this year early morning Sunday 31st October). I know that because of what friends say and by the incredible number of responses to the MP Tim Yeo’s timely piece in the Guardian last Friday.
Yeo argued that  the Single/Double Summer Time (SDST), proposed by his  private member’s bill in 2006-07  ‘would mean that clocks move forward by one hour throughout the year to GMT+1 in winter and GMT+2 in the summer.’
He added, ‘bringing our waking hours more into line with the hours of daylight would reduce energy demand and cut fuel bills. A Cambridge University study in 2007 showed that both peaks in demand for electricity and actual energy consumption would be lower under SDST, particularly throughout the winter. It was estimated that carbon emissions would be cut annually by 1.2m tonnes at no cost to consumers and without reducing GDP. An earlier study by the Policy Studies Institute also concluded the change would reduce energy use and fuel bills and this was confirmed by the National Grid.’

One of the very odd things about that private members bill was the weird way all the members debating it in the chamber disappeared completely from the camera records of the debate for… two hours; as if that was not enough of a time peculiarity the subsequent Hansard report of the proceedings noted that those who voted against voted two hours prior to those who voted for yet the tellers told the tales as being two hours minus the one before plus the two after making it three less one which (of course) is two; and everybody subsequently had tea in the Commons Tea Room at four which would have been six if it had not been two. By a bizarre coincidence the debate took place on April Fool’s Day (the same date as this post) two years ago less one recurred, depending on your point of view. But back to the point…

BST, or to give it its official and slightly mysterious name, Greenwich Daylight Saving Time (GDST) was introduced in 1916 to aid industrial and agricultural production by ‘increasing’ daylight hours for workers. There have been various temporary changes and experiments since but GDST remains. This link sums it all up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Summer_Time

The reader comments that followed Yeo’s article – you can read them here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2010/mar/26/british-summertime-change – run through most of the arguments for and against. My own particular beef is my difficulty of adjusting mentally and physically from one time zone to another, which is effectively what such sudden changes in clock settings require. As a creature of habit, and a lover of the slow processes and cycles of nature, I would prefer no shifts at all. I wish I had the self discipline and bloody-mindedness required to simply ignore government time and stay with ‘natural time’ which is… what?
For me it can be any time standard, provided that once the clocks are set to it they stay where they are – except, that is, for going round and round and reminding us all that while our own personal river of time is getting shorter with each passing year.
It’s about this time every year that I briefly toast the memory of Martial Bourdin, the French anarchist who in February 1894 died when a bomb he was carrying up the hill towards the Greenwich Observatory exploded too early. It emerged that his plan was to blow up the Greenwich Meridian and thus, he seemed to think, disrupt the whole world and possibly time as well. Fantastic! I like to think…