Depressingly mean time

It’s happened again. I dread it each year. We have once more become mindless drones who do exactly what we are told. Free will? Do me a favour! No. Every year, like lemmings, we all agree to put the clocks back by an hour and enter the world of perpetual darkness. I hate it!
 

If I had a choice I would leave Britain on the Saturday before this happened, load my I-phone with Rolf Harris songs and go down under for the period late October to late March. I would escape this self imposed madness and go to the other side of the globe to avoid our horribly dark winters. Dark winters where there is no real cold, no joy inspiring snowfall, just drizzle, dank mornings and the prospect of watching your football team slide into oblivion as the hopes of August are murdered by the realisation that the 11, knuckle dragging, over-paid imbeciles couldn’t even win if the other team didn’t turn up. At least by March gallows humour has taken over, the clocks go forward, lightness returns and the sap rises. At the moment that seems such a long way away.

I admit to being obsessive about the darkness of winter. I have an I –phone application called darkness which shows you the exact time of sunrise and sunset and pin points it to your exact location. I have set mine to include London, Sydney, New Delhi and Perth in Scotland. When I hit the relevant buttons it will tell me that in the middle of this nightmare, on 22 December, Sydney will have 14 hrs and 24 minutes of daylight whilst my colleagues at the DPRC fulfilment centre in Laurencekirk will have a measly 6 hours and 51 minutes of daylight.

Whilst our beer-swilling, rugby-loving cousins are basking in the sunshine we’ll be eking out an existence on a sliver of daylight. Mole-like we will blink through the rain and mist at the small yellow thing that fleeting appears in the sky whilst on the other side of the world they are lapping up all that gorgeous sunshine. Forget winning the ashes. Forget the Rugby world cup final. We get the sticky end of the lollipop and no amount of sporting victories will take that away. Don’t believe me? Try surfing off Montrose basin on New Year’s Day!

Of course I know it’s all for the benefit of farmers. Those early risers need all the daylight they can get when they’re walking their cows to the milking house. I apologise now to any DPRC card holders who are farmers, but I just think it’s a mistake. This may come as a shock to some readers, but in the not too distant past, I actually had a small holding in West Yorkshire. The place had a micro climate that made the ‘Giants Garden’ look like Brisbane. Even in the summer the wind roared, the rain poured and we had to have the heating on. I became quite experienced at leading two horses, Shetland pony and donkey up the lane to their pasture. In winter daylight didn’t arrive until about 8am so most of the time you were leading the animals in semi darkness.

Whilst the two horses and the pony were more or less happy to be led, Oscar our Buddhist donkey was of a different mindset. He would often stand dead still wherever he fancied as morning traffic hooted to move him. When a donkey stops nothing moves them. Gentle coaxing? No way. A prod up the backside? Try harder mate! Shouting? Temporary deafness descended upon him. Oscar would not budge until he had finished his meditations. I suspect what ran through his mind most mornings was something along the lines of “Why is this idiot taking me to a field in the middle of the night?!”

Oscar may well have been ahead of the game but I know others who have equally been dead against the ending of BST. I had a girlfriend whose Mum refused to put her watch back an hour every year. So we’d arrange to meet her for a coffee at say 11.00 only for her to turn up at noon. That was almost as much fun as Oscar! The said girlfriend also laboured under the impression that the clocks going back meant you got an extra hour in bed every day for the whole of the GMT period. The look on her face when I told her that this was not the case was abject horror. I imagine the same horror descended on the citizens of East Germany after the fall of the Berlin wall as they realised the Trabant was not a socialist triumph of workers engineering but a rusty, temperamental pile of garbage when parked alongside a VW Golf.

Yet we are no different to our former East European comrades. Cajoled by weather forecasters (who no longer tell you what the weather is going to be but spend most of the time reviewing what has happened), we’re reminded in a friendly, but ever so sinister way, to put the clocks back - we obey.

So it becomes our winter of discontent where the making of glorious summer is the glorious smile of Holly Willoughby on the X Factor. Even that gets clouded by the storm cloud that is Simon Cowell or the murky fog that is Louis Walsh, not to mention the syrupy sycophancy of Cheryl and Danni. The darkness descends and turning the clocks back doesn’t help. Turning the clocks back just confuses donkeys, makes you stand in the rain waiting for an hour for errant time keepers and keeps you glued to the X factor on sad Saturday evenings. Remember time is an illusion dictated by farmers and weather forecasters.

Until next time.