Twice a year we perform the same ritual: we collectively agree that time itself needs a minor adjustment. Not the weather, not our habits, not our stubborn attachment to darkness at breakfast — no, the clocks are clearly the problem.
So we move them.
Forward in spring, because optimism. Back in autumn, because reality. An hour borrowed, an hour returned, as if time were a slightly unreliable library book.
The logic is always presented with a straight face. More light in the evenings! Better for productivity! Good for health! And yet, for several days afterwards, the nation shuffles about like it has mild jet lag without the dignity of having gone anywhere. Curtains are opened at the wrong moment. Dinner feels suspiciously early or oddly late. Children wake up with the precision of Swiss watches, entirely unmoved by parliamentary decisions.
The deeper absurdity is this: the day itself has not changed. The Earth continues its rotation with admirable indifference. Dawn and dusk arrive exactly when physics dictates. Only we insist on pretending that 7am is now 6am, or 6am is now 7am, depending on the season and the collective mood.
Listen. Time has us in its fatal grip, not the other way round.
I remember walking to school in the dark, lights on in the shops, pre Christmas excitement in the air. That would have been in the Sixties. Tufty the road safety squirrel, armbands on. Remember the story about how people went nuts when the Gregorian calendar came about, eleven days knocked off. They thought they had lost eleven days of their life. They thought they had aged eleven days overnight. Imagine if Paisley had been around then.