Digital mayhem
Grandad October 26th, 2008
Here we go again.
Twice a year they manage to screw up my body clock so I don’t know what time it is. It also leads to the same conversation every time -
“What time is it?” says Herself.
“Six.”
“It feels later than that?”
“That’s because it’s seven.”
“But you said it was six?”
“This time yesterday it was seven, but now it’s six.”
“So what time is it really?”
And so on…
In times past, changing the clocks was a relatively simple affair. You twiddled a knob, or you moved the hands. Now everything is fucking digital. And there are ten times as many clocks around the house.
When I was a kid, we had two clocks in the house, and my parents had wristwatches, That was it.
Now I have to change my watch, my mobile phone, the VCR, the oven, the microwave, the tin opener, the clock in the car, the timer on the heating and a load of others that I always forget. And the bastards who make digital stuff never copped onto the idea of going backwards, so every clock has to be set forward by 23 hours.
I think it was back in the 70s, someone had the brave idea of dropping all this crap and leaving the clocks as the were. It was great. No clocks to be changed and no jetlag in the morning. But the farmers complained. Like death and taxes, the one immutable fact of life is that the farmers will complain about anything. I think they moaned because they had to get up in the dark to milk the cows. I never knew that cows ran on Greenwich Mean Time? I always thought they followed a more natural rhythm.
Anyway, we are back to the farce. We are back to the dark and dismal evenings, because all the valuable daylight hours have been shoved forward to be wasted in the morning when I’m still asleep.
There is a very simple solution to all of this messing around.
Everyone knows that the sun rises in the east, and that countries to the east of us are already enjoying daylight, while the sky here is only beginning to glow.
If you want brighter mornings, then all you have to do is move east.
Fuck off to Iraq.
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