Peter Hitchens whines about the clocks going forward.
People will do the weirdest things if they can be persuaded that they are normal. It is as if we were hypnotised. A week today, for example, millions of us will go quite mad without thinking about it or questioning it. We will suddenly pretend that it is an hour later than it actually is.
Noon (a real physical event) will be called one o’clock. The early mornings will grow abruptly dark. The delightful gradual lightening of the evenings of the past few weeks will be suddenly accelerated and, by June, official time will be so out of kilter with reality that it will not get dark in London until ten o’clock.
The rest is the same stuff we get at this point every six months. No one is listening, because no one cares. I like BST. I like those late evenings as the sun sinks at about ten o’clock. It is not, as Hitchens says, weird or insane. I suppose it is useful to be able to recycle an article every six months, though.
Hitchens was sound on covid, but otherwise he’s a bit of a berk. His stuff on cannabis is bordering on the deranged and obsessive – this one is just obsessive. Time he got over it and moved on.
Personally, I’m the opposite.
I travel away to work two days a week which means getting on the road before 5am on the day I travel. Mornings are starting to get pleasantly light but in a week it will get dark again.
By October it will be pitch black when I arrive, going lighter again early morning a week later.
Sorry, but for some of us, all this fucking about with clocks is a royal pain.
Just Pick one and stick to it! Which, I’m not bothered.
They tried that when I was a kid. They dropped it after one winter as we were all going to school in the pitch black. Personally, I like BST and the switch to GMT in October makes me depressed as we then have those dark afternoons. I hate that time of the year.
I’m a morning person, so I much prefer real time.
But alas, I’m stuck with BST.
Thinking about it a bit more though, any change would doubtless make things worse as I’m sure BST or GMT would be declared “racist” and we would have to adopt “black time” (I shudder to think what they would invent) or some such atrocity.
There is that. Nothing would surprise me these days.
It is safer for children if they go to school and return home in daylight. Therefore the school hours should be changed so that schools open one hour after official sun rise and close one hour before official sun set. I am sure that teachers would agree that this is best for their pupils. You know it makes sense. For the same of the children. (childreen?).
Of course real logic would have the long school holiday in mid Winter, not during the long daylight hours of summer.
Many teachers, probably most teachers, are motivated by what is best for pupils. Almost no educational managers have the same motivation. Most of them are parasitic office-dwellers living off the efforts of people who do the work in the classrooms. See Pourenelle’s Iron Law of Bureaurocracy.
I’ve always thought that the system that we currently have just makes the best use of the available daylight. In the summer, lighter evenings are more useful than an hour of extra daylight before most people get up.
That’s generally my take on it. Hitch is making a big fuss about nothing when he complains about forcing us to get up an hour earlier or falsifying our clocks. Time measurement is arbitrary, so it doesn’t really matter when it is measured from or too as long as it is consistent.
I agree 100 percent, I think that this show that Hitchens is a bit weird to be honest.
Now most of my stuff updates itself, I’m sanguine about it all!
Most of mine does. I have a couple of bikes that don’t and some wind up clocks, but it’s no big deal.
At least it means I adjust the clocks twice a year 🙂
I’m afraid I tend to agree with Hitchens on this matter. The whole thing is back to front. If any time in the year needs the clocks going forward an hour it’s in the winter, when we’re usually on GMT.
So, put the clocks forward in winter, and keep them on GMT during the summer. There’s no need for it still to be light at 10pm in summer.
As I mentioned above, they did try BST in winter but abandoned it after one winter as children were going to school in the dark.
I’m happy with the current arrangement as it makes the most of the available daylight. There’s something evocative about a balmy summer’s evening sitting in the garden watching the sun go down at ten in the evening. My response is purely emotional and I acknowledge this, just as my visceral loathing of the dark evenings in winter. Unlike Hitchens, I recognise that I’m exhibiting an emotional response. His complaints about the Kaiser are puerile frankly. And even as someone who has nationalist leanings, I am more than happy to do things that originated from elsewhere.
The problem with changing the clocks in winter is that when the days are at their shortest we get only eight hours or so of daylight anyway. No amount of pissing about with clocks can change that.
Hitchens isn’t the only one who bangs on about the changing of the clocks. Christopher Snowdon (who I think wants BST all year round) also can’t help going on about the clocks twice a year.
As I’ve mentioned already, we’ve tried BST all year and it was shit. I’m perfectly comfortable with the current arrangement. There are important things in this world to get incensed about. This isn’t one of them.
Hitchens obsession with cannabis comes from seeing a young person he knew (son of a friend?) develop severe psychosis from cannabis usage. I think the obsession with bst comes from the fact that the first to implement was germany. He’s often described bst as Berlin time. For an English nationalist (he suggested that the uk should be broken up and England become a sovereign nation again) that might be intolerable. Lets face it there really isn’t a thing called real time measured by clocks it’s an artificial construct – eg French Republican calendar time system used in France from 1794 to 1800, during the French Revolution, which divided the day into 10 decimal hours, each decimal hour into 100 decimal minutes and each decimal minute into 100 decimal seconds
I have lived with alcoholism up close and personal, so I understand the damage substance abuse can do. Unlike Hitches, I’m well aware that prohibition is a fool’s errand. People still smoke cannabis, despite the legality, so his constant banging on about it won’t change anything. More laws, won’t help.
One of the things about cannabis is that the authorities will NEVER mention it if a crime occurs.
https://attackersmokedcannabis.wordpress.com/
I know from personal experience that it can make people aggressive and unpredictable and I know of two incidences where it ruined lives – one of which died of a drug overdose at age 23.
It dissolves in the myelin sheath which form the outer covering of nerve cells and in the brain where is takes about a week to leech out. That is why drug tests can detect it after that amount of time. My concern is that the medical establishment warns and can detect fetal alcohol syndrome and its effect on the developing brain is well known. If the cannabis active ingredient passes through to the placenta and affects the brain of the child, what then? For the next 70-odd years society will have to support and suffer the consequences of “it is just a natural high and less dangerous than alcohol” opinion.
But people like Tony Blair, and the higher ranks of the Police farce think it is cool and trendy so it has effectively been decriminalised.
On this occasion, I’m in agreement with Blair and co. We know what happens with prohibition – it fuels a criminal economy and people still take it. If people want to ruin their lives taking these substances, let them do it legally.
Hitchens is right. I hate the clocks changing. Pick a time and stick to it. Personally, I would go with GMT. That’s what decades of getting up at 5am does for you.
He’s morally right on cannabis, but Prohibition can never work – if you can’t keep drugs out of prison then even if you turn the whole of society into an open prison you still won’t be able to eliminate drugs. No easy answers to that one.
I am looking forward to the clock in my VW being right for the first time this year.