It’s time for me to confess – I hate the clock change.
That one hour difference meant I slept through my alarm going off on Monday morning and felt jet-lagged for the rest of the day.
Just as I was getting used to the lighter mornings, I am back to feeling like I am getting up at an unnatural hour again.
And it’s not just my body clock that is affected by this British tradition – I spent most of my Sunday trying to change all the clocks in my house – including searching for instructions for the various digital bedside timepieces/cooker clocks etc that are scattered about my home. And don’t even talk to me about the clock in my car – that now stays an hour wrong for six months of the year!
Still, I shouldn’t complain. An article in The Telegraph pointed out that royal staff spend over 50 hours changing the 1,000 clocks in the Queen’s residencies. It’s such a big project it takes months to plan and involves staff working through the night.
So why do we change the clocks twice a year? The person to blame is a man called William Willett, who first proposed the idea in 1907 to help us make better use of our hours of daylight. He was highlighting the fact that in the summer, we were wasting early morning daylight whilst still in bed, but then wasting energy using lights at the end of the day.
The system was trialled during the First World War and then made official with an act of parliament in 1916.
http://www.rmg.co.uk/discover/explore/british-summer-time-and-daylight-saving
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/0/do-clocks-change/