An extra hour in bed, a lost hour of daylight, and a kite string with strong views on both.
BRIGHTON, England – I have a history student’s respect for the wartime clock change and absolutely none for what it has done to my kite schedule. Time Out London reports that the practice began in wartime to make better use of daylight and save fuel during wartime, and that after the change London’s sunset falls to 4.45pm. I would like it noted that nobody consulted the kites.
Morning: The Extra Hour That Was Not Extra
My phone corrected itself in the night, as phones do. My body did not. I woke at what it insisted was seven o’clock, found the phone saying six, and lay there like a Victorian clerk who has been told the office has moved.
Down the road a cockerel started up. Someone in the flat above mine thinks it is a ringtone. I have since learned it is a real cockerel with a real grievance, which sent me straight to the sort of story I should have been avoiding before breakfast: this farm.fm tale of chicken faces and a rooster noise suit. If that is what dawn sounds like in the countryside, I stand with the people who want the clocks left alone.
My flatmate Fenwick, who owns four alarm clocks and trusts none of them, spent twenty minutes walking the flat changing the oven, the microwave and a kitchen clock shaped like a hen. The oven now disagrees with the microwave by exactly one hour, and Fenwick says this is called “keeping both options open”.
Midday: The Reading List Takes Its Revenge
Dr Pemberton-Hale, our tutor, has set a chapter on how wartime Britain managed its daylight. Forty pages. I read the first twelve in the library and learned that people in 1916 were also furious about the clocks, and that they wrote letters about it, and that the letters were also long.
The chapter’s best detail is that the whole scheme was sold as a fuel saving. Nobody promised anyone a nicer evening. Dr Pemberton-Hale underlined this in green and wrote “NOTE: ADMINISTRATIVE DRAMA” in the margin of the handout, which I think is the most she has ever said about anything.
I took notes on a lined pad, then lost the pad, then found it under a tangle of kite string that had crept into my rucksack overnight. Kite string does this. It is not a material, it is a lifeform.
The Kite Shop Interlude
I bought three more reels on the way to the beach. The man in the kite shop, Desmond, sells string by the metre and sighs by the minute. I asked for fifty metres of the strong sort and he looked at me for a while, then looked at my rucksack, then said “you already have fifty metres” and handed over a hundred.
Desmond is the only person in Brighton who has never once told me the wind was not up to much. He just says “it’s coming” and goes back to a crossword that appears to have been the same crossword since spring.
Late Afternoon: Kite Versus Dusk
Here is the practical consequence of the clock change. By the time I reached the seafront with Admiral, my diamond kite, the light had the thin, tired look of a lampshade. The wind was perfect, a steady westerly with no nonsense in it, and Admiral went up like he had somewhere to be.
Then the sun left. Not gradually, in the way a sensible sun would, but in one go, like a guest who has seen the bill. Within twenty minutes I was flying a kite I could only locate by the tension in my forearm and the sound of a small child nearby asking his mother whether I was “doing fishing”.
I brought Admiral down by feel, wound in the string by feel, and ended the session by feel, which is an uncomfortable phrase to apply to anything done on a promenade. If London’s sunset is at 4.45pm, I assume the coast is not getting a much better deal. I have written to nobody about this.
Evening: Quiz Night and the Group Chat
The flat group chat spent the whole afternoon in a heated debate about whether the extra hour should be counted as Saturday or Sunday. Marguerite argued it belongs to Saturday, since it is technically still night. Fenwick argued it belongs to nobody. Tobes sent a photo of a clock with no hands and the word “Greenwich” underneath, which is the only contribution that has ever made me laugh, and which I will now be stealing for The London Prat.
That, incidentally, is the sort of line my readers there expect. If you like your Cockney rhyming slang with a bit of seasonal grievance, this explainer on Cockney rhyming slang is the nearest I can get to showing you how the flat talks when the clocks go back. We call the dark evenings “the Greenwich”, we call the walk home “the long mean time”, and we will not be taking questions.
Our pub quiz team, the Magna Cartas, met at the Anchor and Crumpet, a pub I will describe only as one with a carpet that has seen things. The history round included a question on the 1916 clock change. I wrote down the answer in under four seconds. Tobes, who has never read a book in his life, wrote down a different answer with total confidence. We lost the round by one point and the night by three.
- Score on the history round: 6 out of 8, with two of those marks gifted by a sympathetic quizmaster.
- Score on the music round: 1 out of 8, and it was a guess.
- Sausage rolls eaten: nine, shared between five of us, which is arithmetic nobody enjoys.
Last Thing: The Chip Shop Verdict
The night ended where all my nights end, in the queue at the chip shop by the bus station, five of us leaning on a fridge full of fizzy drinks and going over the clock change one more time. Marguerite is writing a petition. Fenwick has volunteered to carry it, provided somebody tells him which hour he is in.
For the record, I am in favour of the change, in the loose sense that I am in favour of anything that was introduced in 1916 and is still annoying people. A century of complaints is a tradition, and tradition is what I am paying a university to tell me about. Further background on the whole business is on the Royal Museums Greenwich page on why the clocks change, which I recommend to anyone who has stood in a kitchen with a hen-shaped clock and lost.
Tomorrow Admiral and I will try the beach earlier. If you are ever in Brighton and see someone at dusk talking firmly to a ball of string, do not worry. It is only me, and you can find more of my daily notes at The London Prat. The kite is fine. The string has won.
For those who like their news dressed as a headline, there is also the British Onion corner of the network, where a cockerel with a grievance would get at least two paragraphs.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/