Today is the 28th day of March, 2021. More to the point, perhaps, it is the last Sunday of said month of March. This means, gentle reader, that it is the day when, according to current practice, the clocks go forward one hour. Yes, had you been awake at 2am this morning and watching your radio-controlled clock, you would have seen it spin the hands round to indicate 3am.

Every year, people are caught out by this and turn up to work or to church or to other assignations an hour late. It makes us lose an hour’s sleep which we shall not recover until the silliness is reversed on the last Sunday of next October.

Changing the clocks twice a year comes at a cost and disrupts the flow of life. Our metabolism is impacted and the effects are apparently long lasting.

Many countries have abandoned the practice of changing the clocks. The EU was discussing a proposition to abolish it but Covid-19 intervened. Once things return to some sort of “normal”, I think it quite likely that the EU will in fact discontinue clock-changing.

Why do we even do it? The oft repeated “reasons” are largely spurious and the product of over-active imaginations. Most commonly blamed are a group of folk labelled “farmers” who, supposedly, want to rise and hour later in winter than in summer. Fine, if they did wish to do this, nothing is stopping them. They can could do so without bothering the rest of us. In fact, farmers have made it clear that they would be quite happy if the clocks were permanently set to summer time.

The second most common piece of nonsense is that without putting the clocks back in winter “children would have to go to school in the dark, increasing chances of accidents on the roads.” This silly argument neglects to mention that said children will be returning home in the dark when they are, if anything, more prone to accidents, being tired and in a hurry.

Turn it whichever way you will and the arguments make no sense whereas leaving the clocks alone makes a lot of sense.

One idea that has been mooted in that of “splitting the difference”. We change the clocks by one whole hour. Why? No doubt because any amount of time less than an hour is considered unnoticeable. Right then, why not make one single, final change to the clocks, setting them 30 minutes behind current summer time? That is, why not set the clocks midway between summer and winter time and leave them there? By the above argument, the change would be unnoticeable.

In fact, I don’t think that there is really any point in engaging in such tinkering. Public opinion is swinging against clock- changing and more and more bodies (including “farmers”, as we saw) are stating publicly that they would be happy to remain permanently on what is currently called “summer time”. It only remains to convince the government to stop dragging its feet and to repeal the 1972 Summer Time Act.

Simple things, though, take an inordinate amount if time to accomplish when governments are involved.