What a Good Thing we Said No to Berlin Time

As I pedalled through the pre-dawn gloom to the station this morning, in pelting rain and rather later than usual,  I rejoiced that at least the plan for Berlin Time had been defeated.

 

This scheme would have tied our clocks to Central European Time, based on a  meridian a few dozen miles east of Berlin, undeclared Capital of the EU. This would mean that the stygian mornings of this time of year would extend until well after nine o’ clock. This is obviously unnatural and also particularly dangerous to early-morning travellers on foot or by bike.

 

The corollary, of course, would have been blazing daylight until after 10.00 p.m. in the high summer weeks, equally unnatural and unwelcome to those whose work depends on early rising.

 

Looking back, it is amazing that the plan was beaten, thanks to a small but dogged group of intelligent and courageous MPs - and I can’t help wondering how long it will be before this proposal rises again from its grave. It plainly has its origin somewhere in the great Blob of Euro-enthusiasm ,for there is no other explanation for the way it is brought back, again and again, to Parliament.  Alas, far too few people see through this. Ridiculous claims that the clock change will in some mysterious way benefit tourism and business are made and accepted without any attempt to verify them.

 

The very name of the last campaign ‘Lighter Later’ was fundamentally dishonest, because it implied that there was some sort of available pool of spare light, which could be tapped by this measure . Of course this isn’t so. If it was lighter later at one time of day, it would be darker later at another.

 

And then there was the strange rage of the clock-changers at my use of the phrase ‘Berlin Time’ . Why didn’t I call it Paris Time?, some asked.

 

These people simply refused to understand the simple point that time is actually based upon physical realities. There is such a thing as noon, objectively defined by the moment at which the sun is at is zenith in a particular place.  If you mark noon at the same time as Berlin does, then you are on Berlin time. Now, if you’re in Berlin, this makes perfect sense. But why would you do so if you were several hundred miles further west or east, and your noon was therefore significantly later, or significantly earlier ?

 

Well, there’s only one reason, and that is politics. It’s a ‘who whom?’ question. The time on the clock, if it varies from natural time,  is a sign of who’s in power in the locality involved. Free countries keep their own time. Subject provinces keep the time of their imperial masters.  There’s a rather fetching facsimile of the 1913 Bradshaw’s rail guide to the Continent on sale at the moment, crammed with imaginary journeys to lost cities across vanished frontiers, a huge treat for the fertile mind.  But it is quite clear from it that pre-1914 Europe, before the irresistible domination of Germany took shape in steel and concrete, did not set its clocks by Berlin. Paris time (sensibly, given its closeness to the Greenwich meridian) was in those days the same as London time. Amsterdam is half way between.  

 

Now, what I didn’t get into during the battle (because it would only have confused things) was the related issue of so-called ‘Daylight Saving Time’, under which we endure the twice-yearly silliness of pushing our clocks backwards and forwards. I am very sensitive to time (which makes long eastbound air journeys a nauseating nightmare for me, and which meant that I also never fully adapted to living in Washington DC, five hours behind my normal time, perhaps because I was always working for an office that was on London hours). I particularly hate being hurried forwards in the Spring , just as the days are lengthening quite satisfactorily all by themselves. Early risers (I’m a lark, not an owl) begin to notice the lighter mornings quite early in the year, when slug-abed types have no idea that the days are getting longer . I generally get a sort of jet lag for several weeks after the clocks go forward, dazed and irritable in the early hours.

 

I’ve never seen any evidence that this clock-shifting does the slightest good to anybody, ever, or ever has. It’s just one of those cranky ideas (the brainwave of a bug-hunter in New Zealand, George Vernon Hudson,  who wrongly imagined that changing the clocks would give him more time to run about catching insects, and of a pestilential English speculative builder, William Willett, who couldn’t abide the fact that other people were asleep when he was up and about, and who liked  - groan - playing golf late into the evening and didn’t see why others shouldn’t suffer for his pleasure).  Somehow these unloveable people got political backing   – war, as usual, providing the supposedly unanswerable excuse for it, giving government a permanent pretext for poking its nose into people’s private lives and pretending ( what’s the logic, exactly?) that the war effort would benefit as a result.

 

People now assume this strange arrangement is normal, simply  because it’s existed throughout their lifetimes.  It’s the opposite of normal. If you want to get up earlier, get up earlier. If you want to open your school or business an hour earlier in the morning, explain that to those involved and see if you can persuade them to do it. Of course, you’d never get it past the unions.  But forcing everyone to do this by messing around with the clocks, and shifting the opening hours of shops, the timetables of trains and buses , and the broadcasting schedules of TV and radio, seems to me to be strangely dictatorial. ‘YOU WILL GET UP EARLIER!’, it shouts. To which I, a person who generally gets up before or at 6.00 a.m, reply ‘Why should I?’. But because nobody ever thinks about anything, it persists.

 

And here may be a point. I think this bossy scheme is most beloved by metropolitan late risers, media types and politicos, who seldom see the sunrise at any time of year, and who view going to bed as sort of defeat, rather than a welcome end to the packed day of the early riser. When the clocks go forward, they just wake when they always would have done, to find that a bit more of the day has drained away while they were snoring. Who cares? Not they. They’ve slept till they woke naturally  - whereas people such as me have to be hammered into groggy wakefulness by the drilling noise of the alarm, and faced with going to bed in the summer months when it is still more or less light.

 

Well, you might say, split the difference, as we do.  I don’t myself see why we should, though I can certainly see why we shouldn’t go any further along this strange route.  We don’t pretend, for the sake of it, that hills are a hundred feet higher than they are, or valleys a hundred feet deeper. Even under the ‘Passengers’ Charter’ we don’t pretend that trains are faster than they are, though the train companies do at least have compelling economic reasons for inventing new definitions of the expressions ‘reliable’ and ‘on time’. Note, though, it’s the  definitions they fiddle with, not the actual times. What is the solid, objective unanswerable reason for following this odd fashion? What measurable good has it ever done?

 

I can think of no other measure where we pretend that things are physically different from what they are for half the year. What’s more, give them an hour and they’ll try to take two. Having once conceded the daft idea that the clocks should be forced by the law to  lie, we open ourselves to the next stage, of having to be one hour out in winter, and two hours out in summer, and never, ever again having our own natural English time.

 

I’m actually surprised and saddened that more people aren’t angered by this, just as I’m filled with sorrow that so many people of my generation have weakly caved into metric measurements, dull, inhuman, inconvenient and unpoetic. I don’t think the pre-1914 people of this country would have been such a pushover, and it just reinforces my view that 1914 was the moment everything started to go wrong.