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Cometh the hour... to demand we stick to GMT

JUST imagine if your boss had sent you a memo on Friday saying: ‘Be at work an hour early on Monday. This is an instruction, no exceptions allowed.’

You would think they had gone off their heads, and you would probably be right.

But when the Government declares that, this weekend, you should set all your clocks an hour ahead of real time, you obey. I admit that you probably don’t know, until the day arrives, which way time is supposed to go. But as you surface blearily into this Sunday morning, you will be realising that last night you should have advanced all your clocks by an hour. Unless you’re one of the rare people with busy Sundays, it won’t really hit you until tomorrow morning, when a wave of jet-lag will strike millions as they struggle to work earlier than they want to.

Neurology and Paediatrics Professor Beth Ann Malow, writing in the Scientific American, wants you to realise that the two clock changes are very much not the same.

When the clocks go back in October, people get up later and generally feel fine. The change you’re enduring today is the bad one, associated with an increase in heart attacks in a major survey of evidence in the US Journal Of Clinical Medicine.

Jamming the clocks forward, in other smaller surveys, is also linked with fatigue, workplace injuries and general mortality.

Why do we do this? It’s thanks to various oddballs and fanatics of the Edwardian era, the sort of people who would otherwise have campaigned for other fads – world languages, such as Esperanto or Volapuk, fish-only diets or wool-next-the-skin. But they fixed on clock-twiddling instead.

By a terrible mischance, the weird idea of moving the clocks about, wisely rejected by lawmakers for years, was taken up by Germany’s imperial government in 1916, supposedly to boost the Teutonic war effort. British politicians, afraid this might be a secret weapon, followed suit and we have been stuck with it ever since, despite a distinct lack of evidence that it boosts production, saves electricity or does anything else useful.

Now at last the moment may be coming when governments around the world might be willing to give it up. But beware. Many of them want to fix the clocks in the jet-lag position, instead of on natural time. Resist this plan. Insist on good old Greenwich Mean Time, to which we shall all gratefully return in October. Put the clocks back just one more time, then leave them there.

France In Flames

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2023-03-26T07:00:00.0000000Z

2023-03-26T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://mailonline.pressreader.com/article/282136410662832

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