KNUT, THE CLOCKS AND ME

It’s October. In the UK, it’s the start of autumn, the season of ‘mists and mellow fruitfulness’. Unfortunately, it’s also the most depressing month of the year, because October is the month when the effects of the most absurd attempt at social engineering ever foisted on the world are most keenly felt.

I refer to Daylight Savings Time. Woolly-minded politicians all over the world decided in 1916 that it would be a great idea to mess around with our clocks. The concept was to add an extra hour of ‘useful daylight’ to our day in winter. Some genius decided that the way to do this was to change the clocks in summer, when daylight is plentiful. The idea that the basic astronomical facts of life can be changed by legislation is weird indeed. King Knut would have been amused and very irritated by such a preposterous proposal. This Great Dane, decided to disprove the overstated claims as to his divine power by going to the beach and proving that the tide would not obey his command, contrary to the claims of the local spin-doctors of the day.

One third of people in the UK suffer (to a greater or lesser degree) from a condition known as Seasonal Affective Disorder, so named to produce the acronym ‘S.A.D.’ Acronyms are something I generally loathe, but I do have to admit that this one is particularly apt. S.A.D. plunges many of us into deep depression and is a recognized pathological condition. The NHS spends millions on treating its victims and the economy ships huge damage each year as the victims of this condition are unable to work normally. SAD is the result of insufficient daylight during winter months. The short daylight hours mess with our body-clocks and the lack of light affects serotonin levels in our brains.

There is nothing we can do, short of sitting under bright lights for a couple of hours a day, to lengthen daylight hours. So we just have to grin and bear it. If nature were left to her normal course, we could, at least, get used to the shortening winter day gradually and thereby become conditioned to it. Instead, we wake up one morning in October with the dread knowledge that it will, all of a sudden, be dark when we leave work. This plunges me (and my fellow sufferers) into a depression that can last for months.

This is one of the most devastating examples of ill thought-out knee-jerk legislation and the lasting damage such inane law-making can do. It’s also living proof that, as we pile on law after law onto our statute-book, we just never get round to repealing the redundant or truly inane laws that we’re already stuck with.

So here’s a piece of legislative tom-foolery that really should be repealed. Remember – it’s British Summer Time that is the adjustment to the clocks, not Greenwich Mean Time, which prevails during the winter. If we do away with British Summer Time, there is no re-organisation of our winter time-table required. All we do is: get rid of that awful shock to our body-clocks that is inflicted every October.

It would save huge amounts of money for the economy if we simply left the clocks alone in the spring (which is when the damage is actually done).

Of course, our political masters are far to busy legislating as fast as they can to get around to doing something so simple, so obvious, so beneficial and so easy.