Put your clocks back tonight/sunday am.
Absolutely… we normally change the clocks Saturday evening around 9/10pm.. just in case we’re too tired when we trundle to bed ![]()
Yes I do too as I forget otherwise. One year after moving to France we forgot and sent the kids to school and hour early, that was a social joke for years but in good humour.
I don’t forget, but I hate it and some clocks I simply don’t change because they are too complicated (for me
) and I have got into the habit of mentally changing them each time I look at them. The sooner the whole stupid system is done away with the better in my opinion.
Twice a year people in the north of Scotland protest at this idea because of the kids going to school in the dark. Well send them an hour earlier or later then, on the shortest days you can’t avoid the darkness at one end or the other.
Note to self for tomorrow morning, the internet radio next to my bed will be correct again ‘till May. ![]()
I hate it too David, pretty pointless exercise as far as I’m concerned.
As for the kids going to school in the dark a), get used to it , and b), very few kids walk to school, they go by car/bus, especially in rural areas.
This may have been mentioned before, the three-year experiment in the UK keeping to British Summer Time all year. I remember mornings that stayed dark forever and most people hated it.
The mornings being darker has nothing to do with the time on your clock, it is what it is, adjust your habits if it troubles you (not you personally @Jennifer11 it is a general ‘you’
) because whatever you do you cannot adjust the length of the hours of darkness.
I must have missed that experiment in ‘68, travelling through many time zones as I was in those days. Any idea why they did not stick with it in ‘71?![]()
I think they stuck with it until the end of the three years but Parliament voted not to continue the experiment after that.
Yes, just had a read of the link, once again banging on about kids and farmers in darkness, there are still X hours of darkness which is less in summer than in winter, simply adjust habits, not clocks. ![]()
Well I can’t change the hours I work do I for one am very much looking forward to it being light in the morning again, at least for a few weeks. Its awful driving through the small wood roads in the dark, bothers me less in the evening.
Don’t overlook the fact that France is further south than the UK and has longer daylight hours anyway. In the UK the dark mornings were horrible - and dangerous. Nowadays everyone is being ‘encouraged’ not to use cars - but to use public transport, or cycle or walk - in the dark winter mornings - it was, and is, dangerous because there’s more traffic in the hours from 7.30 to 9 am than there is in the evenings.
Living in France the dawn times in winter are earlier than in the UK - there is a geographical distance. One third or the world, north and south, do still put clocks forward/back. (On a side note - Spain has their time one hour too far ahead of the Greenwich Line - should be more aligned with Eire !!)
I never change the clock in my Peugeot Partner car. It’s not really difficult to do, but it is a real faf. Also, it knows what year it is, so why on earth can’t it change the time automatically ?
France does have longer daylight hours in the winter, but it has shorter daylight hours in the summer and the further south you go the bigger the difference both summer and winter.
And Portugal follows UK time and so is one hour behind the rest of Europe. When you go over the border between Spain and Portugal, you have to adjust your watch ![]()
Nah… when you go into Portugal you just relax… and forget what time it is ![]()
Eh - no? The closer you get to the equator (ie south of UK and France) the smaller the difference between summer and winter hours.
(Or have I misunderstood your comment?)
I remember my years in Sao Paulo Brazil (on the tropic of Capricorne) and never quite getting used to coming out of work to a hot evening and darkness.
Not really, I just didn’t express it correctly. I meant to say that the further south you go, the bigger the difference from the UK for both winter (longer) and summer (shorter).
As you suggested, close to the equator you get pretty much year round 12h/12h night/day which feels a bit strange at first.
Sorry - wasn’t clear was I ? - I was referring to the difference between the UK and points south. Not the difference between summer and winter daylight hours in same place. Further north one goes - the shorter the daylight hours in winter - some parts near north pole have no daylight for a short while in winter. Tilt of the earth’s axis in winter up north, or in southern hemisphere does make a difference.
In Turks & Caicos, which is at latitude 21.69N so halfway to the Equator from London/Paris, we still did Summer and Winter time, in step with US Eastern Standard Time - not because we needed a change of hour but so as not to confuse the Cousins coming down from the States for their hols.
Same reason we had the US dollar as our currency and not pounds sterling.
All except the Club Med resort, which being French resolutely stuck to Eastern Caribbean Time, in order to be in step with their other resorts in the region.
This resulted in them having their New Year’s Eve fireworks display an hour before the rest of the island. ![]()
So we used to go and hang out at Flamingo Café just next door on Grace Bay beach to watch Club Med’s display and then wander further west up the beach for the other fireworks at the proper time! ![]()
ETA: we also had to be careful when accepting bookings for family portrait sessions at Club Med, to ensure both we and the client agreed on which time zone we were using. ![]()
There’s a very good, and very readable book on the social and intellectual history of the creation of the international time zones in the late C19th to early C20th. I’ve had it for about forty years and most of it still holds good.
There’s a later edition from 2003, but the original is still sufficient and easily found on the usual s/h sites
There’s a little chunk of Oregon that’s in a different time zone than the rest of the state. It’s so bizarre.