How to Get Jet Lag Without Going Anywhere

The first morning after the clocks go forward I usually manage reasonably well.  It’s a Sunday, and I have to bicycle six miles to church by what would have been 8.30 a.m. yesterday (and what my body, quite reasonably, still thinks is 8.30). But I’ve deliberately gone to bed early the night before, and I’m not actually getting up any earlier than I normally do. Most weekday mornings I’m at the railway station (about three miles by bicycle)  by 7.45, so it’s manageable. I just have less time to get up, read the papers and eat breakfast than I would on a normal Sunday.

 

It’s when the working week begins that the trouble starts. At this time of year, I suddenly have to get up in the dark again, something I thought I’d left behind at the end of January. It was bearable then. Midwinter has the compensation of Christmas and its afterglow. But it is like sliding down a great snake on the snakes-and-ladders board,  to be reintroduced to pre-dawn darkness, after several rather uplifting weeks when the mornings have been growing steadily brighter.

 

I have to set an alarm clock, which I don’t normally need to do. And I have to be at the station at what still feels like 6.45 a.m. because it is, in reality, 6.45 a.m. Yes, I know that the evenings are suddenly lighter later. But so what? They had already been growing slowly lighter, in a rather pleasing way, and I could easily have waited another few weeks for it to be light at seven p.m., in return for it continuing to be light at six in the morning. One person’s ‘lighter later’ is another person’s ‘darker later’. (in the case of early risers, one person's 'lighter later' is the same person's 'darker later', as early risers experience both).  And in any argument about which should prevail, objective truth would seem to me to be a good guide.  Time is not abstract. It’s based on the position of the Sun, relative to the surface of the Earth, and dependent on the longitude at which you find yourself. Noon, in England, is a real, objectively measurable physical relationship between England and the Sun. Likewise, Noon in Berlin, Moscow or Peking is an objectively measurable thing, and happens at a different time in each of them.

 

Any sundial (and my home city has many of them still) will insist on telling the truth about this. But for the next six months, all the clocks in the European Union will lie, to some extent, about this relationship. In England, Noon will be called 1.00 p.m. and eleven o' clock will be called. In France and Spain (and formerly Portugal, which in my original post I wrongly said was included inthis folly but which - as  know perfectly well but had forgotten - escaped from it after popular protests) forced to observe Berlin time though closer to the Greenwich Meridian,  Noon will be called 2.00 p.m. , and ten o' clock will be called noon. Yes, I know that there are minor variations already. Christ Church Cathedral still enjoyably keeps Oxford time, three minutes behind Greenwich. But a whole hour is a different matter.

 

In the debate we had here about the attempt to put Britain on Berlin Time (and how soon will that campaign be back, I wonder?) I had immense difficulty in getting my critics to grasp the following simple points.  Berlin Time was a real thing, justly called Berlin Time because it was based on the relation between the Sun and Berlin, that it is different from Greenwich Time, and that if we switched to it,  it would have radical effects on our lives. And the clocks would have lied all the time, not just half the year. What’s more, they would have lied even more grossly in summer, with nightfall in late June postponed till what is actually almost midnight.

 

Now, I’ve been as jet-lagged as most people, and I hate it. It knocks me sideways.  I specially hate travelling Eastwards because the clocks move forwards. It’s all very well doing this on holiday, when you don’t usually need to start your day early. But even on my recent visit to Chartres, the pitch blackness of the morning at breakfast time was noticeable. It was even more noticeable because my old long-wave radio could just pick up the Radio 4 Today programme, broadcast on the same longitude, but not operating on Berlin time. All the time checks were disconcertingly wrong.

 

But when I have travelled to China on assignment, the jarring effect has been huge, and I’ve usually been more or less prostrate with nausea for several hours after arriving. Stranger yet was my visit to old Kashgar in Chinese Turkestan, in the far west of Peking’s Empire, where they are forced to observe Peking time and it is dark until almost 10 a.m. in midwinter.  

 

In two years of living in Moscow, and another two years of living in Washington DC, I never fully accustomed myself to the local time (perhaps this was because I spent so much time on the phone to London offices, and had to be constantly aware of London deadlines, so was internally operating on two zones at once. All I know is that the human body is very sensitive to time.

 

And I still cannot understand the acquiescence of so many people to the absurdity of ‘Daylight Saving’ which saves no daylight, which favours the slug-abed late sleeper (who couldn’t care less if it is dark at six a.m.)  against the early riser (who cares a lot). What is it actually for? What measurable good does it do? Mostly, we seem to do it (pain in the neck though it is, twice  a year) because we always have done it. Claims of energy saving are thin and disputed.  It’s just another way for governments to boss us around and move our landmarks, introduced on the pretext of war production and never abandoned. 

 

After a week or two, I shall stop feeling quite so jaded and adjust to the new time. The mornings will gradually grow as light as they were before the clocks went forward. But I shall still long for the day in October when we go back to the true time.