Order of the Bath

So Tim Yeo MP (Conservative) was winding up that hairy old topic of Double Summer Time. I notice that he didn’t mention the “E” word in Friday’s interview; he was effectively advocating that we harmonise with Western European mainland time.

But the bill ran out of time and now has little chance of further progress.

Ironic but good news.

Personally I have always believed that the whole concept of summer time was daft. If locally you are wasting the best daylight hours in the morning then get up earlier. If children are at risk going or coming from school or their sleeping time is curtailed, then the school hours should be adjusted, but there is no point in messing with the clocks. When I was a teenager I ignored summer time for one half year and kept my watch on GMT with no problems at all. Admittedly my life and living in general was more relaxed then but it was not difficult to adapt. Even now the only times I take much notice of are appointments (memory permitting).

I am not suggesting that time itself is unimportant. One of my responsibilities in the office is to ensure that that the computer systems keep synchronised and reasonably accurate time. This is important because we need to know when things happened in relation to each other. The absolute is less important but it looks unprofessional if your clock is wrong. To do that we maintain UTC (Coordinated Universal Time in French and the replacement for the old faithful GMT) and apply the offsets to local time only at the last minute. Messing about with Daylight Saving Time in different jurisdictions as they keep changing their minds just wastes time—real time.

This entry was posted on 10 Mar 2008 at 12:14 by Rick and is filed under Miscellaneous, Technical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.