(Spoiler warning, in case you haven’t made it to the end of Sandy Denny’s haunting late-sixties ballad, but she doesn’t know.)
Today, of course, it’s more a question of ‘where does the time come from?’ given that we’ve ‘gained’ an hour overnight. I used to work with somebody, and have encountered several people since, who always dreaded the changing of the clocks because it took him weeks to adjust. I know that it’s ‘a thing’ but I have to admit it’s one I still don’t understand. (I always limit myself to 700 words, so there’s no room to list here all the things I don’t understand – but gears, electric sewing machines, and the plot to Harry Sullivan’s War by Ian Marter all figure on the list.)
Maybe it’s that I’m not sufficiently in tune with the natural world, the rhythms of the sun and moon, the pattern of day and night, and I’m stupid enough to just accept whatever time the clock tells me it is. Actually that’s very possible, given that as a child of the 70s & 80s I’m of the generation that, as Douglas Adams put it, “still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.”
Regardless of how easy or not it is to slip from BST to GMT, I like turning the clocks back. Certainly as a child, I always associated it with the start of the big push towards Christmas. Dark almost as soon as I got home from school, and cold too, the perfect excuse to snuggle down by the fire and watch more TV than I should.
Not, in the interests of full disclosure, that I ever need much of an excuse to watch TV. Recently I’ve been rewatching Michael Palin’s Around The World in 80 Days, and have just done episode six in which, never mind repeating an hour, he crosses the international date line and repeats a whole day!
Aboard ship Michael and a handful of newbie crewmembers are involved in a ritual to mark their first time crossing the line. (The official term may be ‘Date Line Virgins’ but I’m reluctant to Google that.) His voiceover observes, as he is being liberally plastered with some red substance, that the ceremony normally uses red paint but as a concession to him they’ve substituted ketchup. Personally I’d have preferred the paint.
Around The World… was first shown in 1989, having been recorded in late 1988 – and as well as remembering much of the programme from first time around, I also by and large remember 1988. So when the captions come up saying, for example, Day 18 October 12th, and Michael is setting off from Dubai part of me is thinking, he’s missing part 2 of Remembrance of the Daleks. I’ve just passed day 48 and discovered that Michael was exploring Shanghai at the same time as my brother turned 20.
If we’re talking about the weird tricks time plays I’m sure I’m not the only person to have observed that March this year seemed to last for about 30 weeks. My Mum pointed out yesterday, that when Boris made his speech (his, to paraphrase, “go home and stay there” speech) it was the Monday after we’d put the clocks forward. At the time, we probably weren’t that bothered about having one less hour to put up with.
Nevertheless since then, as usual, the months seem to have raced by and now we’re almost out the other end of October. Absurdly, in July and August it felt like we were having a summer break from the Coronavirus, but now that Autumn has taken hold, we’re back in the thick of it. People comparing it to ‘the war’ have become very tiresome… but clearly it WON’T all be over by Christmas.
Anybody who’s already rearranged events for 2021 may be starting to wonder if they’ve been a bit premature in doing so. Sadly it’s all dragged on, probably longer than expected, certainly longer than hoped. No doubt we will get ‘there’ eventually, albeit some things may never be quite the same again. But also, no doubt it’s going to take…
…time.
Andrew Curnow's Ramblings 