Darker Later - at last the clocks return to our natural time

As we finally return to the natural time of these islands, though only for a few months,  I thought it would be pleasant to remember the battle to save us from Berlin Time, fought so doggedly here and by some doughty allies in the House of Commons.

 

It still amazes me how obtuse so many people were. Why, they moaned angrily,  do you call it Berlin time? Why not Paris time, or Rome time?

 Well, I would quietly insist, because it isn’t either of those (Paris, poor subjugated city, really ought to be on GMT but endures Stygian mornings to satisfy Germany’s federalist desire for Europeanised time on the Berlin meridian).

 

Whereas it*is* Berlin time.  I’d explain that while the Greenwich meridian was artificial, time was actually a real event – noon is when the sun is at its zenith. That varies, depending on where on the planet you are. So if our clocks are set an hour, or two hours ahead of where they are now ( and in summer it would have been two hours) they will say it’s noon in London as much as two hours earlier than it really is.

 

In winter, when we would have been an hour ahead of GMT, the clocks would have said it was six in the morning when it was really five. Early risers will have noticed, over the past few weeks, how very dark their journey to work or school has been. But as from Sunday 28th October, when the clocks return to where they ought to be, the mornings will be wondrously lighter, only getting really dark again towards the shortest day just before Christmas.

 

Under the Berlin Time plan, we wouldn’t get those lighter mornings in November, and – worse still – we wouldn’t see the sun till round about nine in the morning in the depths of winter.   

 

Before the First World War wrecked everything, European time zones were much more accommodating. A lovely new reproduction of the old Continental Bradshaw( a railway timetable, for non-Sherlock Holmes readers) details the time that Paris and Amsterdam used to follow, before the stupid war caused the heavy shadow of Germany to fall  across us all . It’s enjoyably complicated and quirky, as foreign travel ought to be.

 

Of course, I’d leave the clocks entirely alone if I could. I’ve never seen the point of messing around with them, a process which gives me something very like jet-lag every spring. I love the seasons. Why shouldn’t the evenings in autumn be dark, and why should we put off the lovely twilight till so late in summer?   But for most people it has gone on all their lives and they never consider that there might be a case for simple, all-year-round time.

 

Lucky Queensland, in Australia, has no truck with this at all, and nor do several of the 50 American states. Perhaps, when I take up my planned late-in-life second career as an annoying, querulous Cornish nationalist, I can achieve all-year-round Truro time, as well as demanding a Cornish-only TV channel, and Cornish street and station signs.  

 

But the danger of Berlin Time hasn’t gone away. The EU wants it, and a ‘private members bill’ demanding it will be tabled again within three years, you may count on it.