Greetings

Welcome to random thoughts from a random brain.

Hopefully in due course these utterings will start to find some form and a theme.

As it’s the first day the clocks have gone back in the UK, welcome back to Greenwich Mean Time. I note from the news that it seems someone has decided to resurrect the intention to remove GMT (or UTC if you prefer) from the general consciousness, with a “trial” of remaining at GMT+1 in the winter, possibly followed by GMT+2 in the summer. Various reasons are put forward – “lighter longer” and fewer accidents in the evenings being just two.

It won’t be lighter longer. The basic laws of physics provide us with the amount of sunlight we get. All we are talking about here is shifting this amount by an hour, or two. In the middle of winter there is possibly 7 hours of daylight, so let’s face it, staying ahead of GMT will not give people more daylight in the evenings. By the time you leave work, it will be dark. It will be dark in the morning on your journey to work. The only thing you will gain is that it will be frosty and cold further into the morning. That might reduce evening accidents, but will increase morning ones.

People say they want lighter evenings for longer in the summer. It doesn’t get dark until around 10pm in the summer. Presumably these people want to make that midnight…. Summer will be 2 hours ahead of the sun (making a mockery of the greeting “good afternoon”). To me that means additional summer heat until later at night and later daylight, resulting in disturbed sleep patterns.

I don’t know many people who stay in bed until it is light in the winter, or many who are able to stay up to midnight to enjoy lighter (and hotter) summer evenings. Most of us are up and out of the door some time between 5am and 7.30am. Those of us who work for a living seem to be spending longer and longer commuting, so it seems we will be doing that at even more unsocial hours, according to the natural rhythms of the day. Were this to go through, believe me my body will know very well that the 4.50am alarm is actually waking me at 2.50am – and it won’t like it!