BST

Really flooding out stuff from my brain these days - ought to settle down...

BST is the odd tradition in Britain of putting the clocks forward in summer. It means we lose an hour of sleep on the morning of the last Sunday in March and symmetrically gain that hour again last Sunday morning in October. It means that the rats in the cage of the British system, seem to think that it is alright to go to work at 8am GMT and clock off at 4pm in the Summer because it is called 9am and 5pm. When BST ends everyone complains that it gets dark so much earlier, not realising that actually they have been fooled into waking up an hour early during the summer.

It is often commented that we should stay in BST all the year around. But this has the disadvantage that the Sun is never South at midday. It makes more sense to reschedule the social traditions so that we go to work at 8am all year around and come home at 4pm. Pubs close at 10pm rather than 11pm and first trains start up at 5am instead of 6am. 6 o'clock news is at 5pm and so on.

This is the neatest solution striking at the heart of the problem. But as I am beginning to realise this Germanic exactness rather takes the fun out of life and people like the ramshackle, awkward twists and turns of tradition, it gives life a bit more character and our environment a bit more complexity.