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Upset about the clocks going back this weekend? You need to try Jane Mean Time

Never mind the extra daylight, wake up to the benefits of Jane Mean Time (Getty Images)
Never mind the extra daylight, wake up to the benefits of Jane Mean Time (Getty Images)

Are you dreading the clocks going back this weekend? Will your Seasonal Affective Disorder be even sadder? Would you rather, given all the coronavirus gloom, hold on to the extra hour of daylight?

Why not try Fae Time? Or, as one friend recently described it, Jane Mean Time? More on that in a moment. Let’s just say I have been operating a one-woman boycott of this time-changing kerfuffle for the best part of a decade. Eccentric? Perhaps. But not entirely irrational, given that a practice begun with the best of intentions is now a source of great irritation.

The problem is this: “normal time” for most countries evolved as a response to the rural rhythms of life. Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is what gives the UK darker evenings and lighter mornings. As in the UK, so elsewhere. And this is inefficient.

The popular version of events has it that “daylight saving” was invented here, in 1907, when Surrey builder William Willett complained about wasting daylight during summer mornings, and persuaded the UK parliament to do something about it. In fact, Willett was beaten to it by New Zealand entomologist and astronomer George Vernon Hudson, who proposed the idea in 1895.

And it was Germany, not the UK, that introduced it first, in 1916, to save fuel during the Great War (by reducing reliance on artificial lighting). Britain followed a few weeks later, though thankfully the scheme they adopted was not Willett’s. His idea involved adding a total of 80 minutes to our clocks in April, in weekly increments of 20 minutes, and then doing the whole thing again in reverse in September.

Still, the idea proved popular, spreading widely north and south. Equatorial countries not so much, because daylight saving makes less difference closer to the equator. Over the years, though, the question of whether to put the clocks back and forth, and by how much, has generated more heat than light – and there has been constant tinkering.

In the Second World War, the UK adopted British double summer time (that’s GMT+2 in summer; +1 in winter). Once more, the aim was to save fuel and increase productivity. In 1968-71, a national trial, known as the British Standard Time experiment, moved Britain to GMT+1 all year round.

The net result was a significant reduction in people killed and injured. Despite this, parliament endorsed the status quo, in 1972, and standardised changing the clocks to late March and late October.

Debate continued, however. In 2004, a private member’s bill sought to decouple Scotland from the rest of the UK for purposes of time setting. The last serious attempt to change the way we do daylight came with the Daylight Saving Bill 2010-12.

But the Scottish Government didn’t like it, and with an independence referendum on the horizon, the bill was politically problematic. Various MPs filibustered it to death, while a certain Jacob Rees-Mogg put up a wrecking amendment to give Somerset its own time zone, 15 minutes behind London. The bill failed when it… ran out of time.

This persistent opposition to change is puzzling. As research makes clear, the long list of benefits likely to accrue from some variant of not putting the clocks back in winter just gets longer. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents likes it. So, too, do environmentalists. And when the chips were down, during both world wars, it was generally agreed that this was the right way to go.

Those cited as perpetually opposed – Scottish people, farmers, the British public – mostly turn out not to have very strong views. On the other hand, media commentators, such as Peter Hitchens, do. So perhaps that is an issue.

Further complication arose in 2002, when an EU directive aligned British clock-changing with other European countries. So the UK is prevented from taking back control of its clocks until January 2021. Please, no one tell Mark Francois.

This same directive also required European countries to implement a common summer time. Although, of course, the UK negotiated its own special exemption, along with other geographic outliers, such as Portugal and Greece.

All this, though, could be about to change, as in March 2019 the European Parliament backed a proposal to end the practice of adjusting the clocks. Coronavirus permitting, 2021 could be the last year EU nations change their clocks. Stand by for further Brexit outrage. For unless the UK follows suit, then for at least half the year, Southern and Northern Ireland will be in different time zones.

Rarely, though, does this debate address first principles. Daylight Saving is a software patch: an attempt to fix the fact that for most countries, their “normal” time zone no longer fits modern post-industrial living and working. But adjusting clocks at different points in the year creates other issues: costs, confusion, and IT overhead. That is why more and more countries are seeking to fix their time to one standard all year round. Not just the EU, but Russia, Turkey and others have given up on clock-switching and, in most cases, also adopted the lighter summer time standard.

Far be it from me to say, “I told you so” but for a host of personal reasons, including a ludicrously late bedtime hour, this is precisely what I have been doing for years, and will continue to do from this weekend. When the rest of you put your clocks back, I shall continue to exist on summer time. Or rather, Jane Mean Time.

This means I shall have lighter evenings, while the rest of you bemoan the gloom. It’s complicated, requires overriding more than a few automated clock systems. But in the end, it works.

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