British Summer Time

If you feel tired over the next few days after the clocks changing then it's all the fault of this man.

Look at him! Look at William Willett! What a c*nt!

I dread to think how many people he's killed or injured over the years in accidents caused by tired people.

This isn't an anti summer thing by the way: I don't really care what the time is so long as they choose one and stop changing it twice a year. Grumble.

Are the clocks forward or backwards?

Spring forward. Fall back.

Besides which, it's very bad for the environment. An extra hour of sunlight every day evaporates more water from the lakes and the rivers, seriously disturbing the ecosystem. It's also very stressful on the animals to make them get up an hour earlier each day.

You say that but a lot of farm animals develop very fixed routines and find it extremely stressful to be suddenly milked or ridden an hour early for no apparent reason. Most farmers hate BST for this reason. :)

Many farms now use a different system in which cows go to the automated, 24hr milking shed when they feel like it, rather than at a set time - that ought to prevent the problem. I imagine that for them, it's a bit like the 3am walk to the all-night petrol station for us: they probably buy a tenner's worth of Pringles and Twixes when they get the munchies, too.

Many farms now use a different system in which cows go to the automated, 24hr milking shed when they feel like it, rather than at a set time

I didn't realise that. I can't help thinking that this must be a hell of a lot better for both the farmer and the animals.

I wonder if it would work for abattoirs too? ;)

Of course I still think of Farmers still being country bumpkins from the 1930's with bits of hay stuck between their teeth and it doesn't occur to me that the industry might have developed. :)

Im the late 90's I actually used to work for the Ministry of Agriculture and helped farmers to fill in their subsidy forms. There were an awful lot of big commercial farmers but there were still a few of the more primitive kind left. One woman used to write to us once a week to tell us about her cow (called Daisy) and she lived in a hut in the Fens with no electricity and a mud floor. I wonder if she's still there now?

One woman used to write to us once a week to tell us about her cow (called Daisy) and she lived in a hut in the Fens with no electricity and a mud floor.

They're really getting quite advanced out there now, aren't they?

I found this map yesterday: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/29/DaylightSaving-Worl...

Blue shows the countries that still put the clocks foward and back.
Orange are the ones that used to have it, decided it was a stupid idea and have stopped doing it.
Red are the ones that never bothered in the first place and have always had one time all year.

This clearly shows that most of the population of the earth (including about 3 billion people in China and India) think that putting the clocks foward is a stupid idea. If they can get through the year without changing what time it is then so can we.

Of course a lot of these countries are nearer the equator and get more sun that we do but I firmly believe that strong facts should never get in the way of making a point about something you're cross about. QED.

Putting the clocks back in autumn is a great idea, because we get another hour of sleep. Putting them forward in the spring takes an hour away, which is far less appealing.

Looking at it this way, I think the best answer is obvious.

I see! We put the clocks back in autumn and then BACK another hour in spring.

We'd have to miss out a day every 12 years to get the dates correct again but I'm not bothered about that. It'd be like an anti leap year or something. I see no other problems with this idea.

I'll petition the government.

On a related note, whose silly idea was it to add leap days to February? No-one wants another day of February. Let's add them to June instead.

I never really notice the clocks changing, but it almost made me miss my train back from London on Saturday night so I'm with you Rob. Got into Victoria at half past midnight, with the next train to Brighton listed as 2am. There were no announcements to say the train was waiting at the platform and no-one in the station to tell us that the clocks were changing at 1am, meaning we only had a half hour wait since 1am immediately became 2am. We only caught it because by chance we saw people running towards our platform and decided to follow them to be safe. Would have had to wait 'til 4am if we hadn't. Gr!

Speaking as a former resident of Brighton and London gig-commuter, I'd say that's a nice problem to have :-)

Ah, the old "missing the train home" problem.

Once when this happened to me I noticed that there was a train to Stanstead Airport so I figured that it was part of the way home and that airports had planes in them. Therefore it must be far cooler and much more fun to wait at Stanstead until 5am instead of hanging about in London for 5 hours.

I sure as hell never did that again.

I didn't realise it was possible to not notice the time change. The clocks changing either way always takes me at least a week to get back into sync again. I must be very sensitive to my routine or something.

It can't be just me who is STARVING hungry yet it's still well over an hour until lunch. Grumble moan complain grumble. :(

I used to sometimes get the coach back to Cambridge that was the A6 to Stansted then waited at Stansted for ages before becoming a coach to Cambridge. It'd leave Victoria coach station after the place had been locked up so you'd have to crouch on the kerb waiting for it. And I never dressed properly as a teenager so it was always a very cold night.

Now I think about it I think my trip to Stanstead was via Coach. I also just about remember waiting on the pavement too. I was probably very drunk.

Yeah, you're all feeling pretty pleased with yourselves having had an extra hour in bed at the weekend. But let's not forget the TERRIBLE COST you'll have to pay in March! William Willett I hate you.

William Willett has arse winnets!

I don't really care what the time is so long as they choose one and stop changing it

Agreed.

Any objections to 8pm? I'm a big fan of 8pm.

9:45pm would be a better choice. 8pm is pub arrival time, and the first pint always goes down to fast to be properly appreciated. The second one, at 8:20pm is usually a guest you've decided to have on a whim and often find not to your taste. The third, at 9:00pm, is something chosen to cleanse the palate of any remaining taste of the 8:20pm pint in preparation for the perfect 9:45pm pint. Then the seven or eight pints after 10:25 are all far too rushed in an attempt to be properly tanked up by 11pm, which is when most good pubs still close.

I'd quite like it to be 4pm on the day I leave work on Friday before a weeks leave.

I also quite like 7am on Sunday morning with the day ahead of me, I can go out and go for a walk and it's nice and quiet because everyone else in the world is in bed with severe hangovers. ;)

A week on and I'm still feeling massively tired at 10pm and then waking up wide awake at 5am. I'm think i'm going to carry on complaining about this twice a year until ACTION is taken. :p

True to form SR, keep it up ;-)

Personally, I think a better plan would be if we stopped the rotation of the Earth. Those who like daylight and warmth could go and live on the sunny side, those of us who do not could go and live in permanent dark winter on the other side and people who like the transitional periods to fall at precisely defined times could live on the borders between the two and move from one to the other as and when they chose.

I'm sure this would be simple to accomplish, and there would be no unwanted side-effects.

http://www.esri.com/news/arcuser/0610/nospin.html

ESRI, (the GIS company who make ARC GIS, the industry standard mapping package that we inexplicably don't use at work), have made a very nice model showing the changes in sea level if there was no centrifugal force. ^

Obviously we'd all be flung off into space and anyone who managed to hold on would quickly die because there'd no longer be a magnetic field to protect us from cosmic rays but in the depths of the horrors of a British summer I'll probably be wishing that this happened so I could go and live on the dark side and be free of the heat. I see no problems with this JT, I'll start some research into how we can make this happen before next year.

"Obviously we'd all be flung off into space"

Would we? Earth's rotational speed is usually said to be 900mph - I don't know if it actually is that, but it's the figure given in Monty Python's Universe Song and I'm going to assume it's more-or-less correct because I can't be arsed with Googling to find out what it really is (and, from a vaguely-remembered figure seen elsewhere, I think it's near enough the actual speed for it not to matter that much at the moment) - which, though quite fast, is a lot less than escape velocity.

Edit: You'd have difficulty getting to work on the train the next day, though. The atmosphere would, presumably, continue rotating at 900mph (or whatever the actual speed is) for at least a while. Having seen how the rail companies dealt with the storm last week, that might give them problems.

Winds of that speed would probably rip everything off of the land and leave the continents bare, you wouldn't end up in space but you'd definitely end up in the upper atmosphere, along with the soil, vegetation and all the rubbish that humans have left everywhere. Still, it'd be pretty cool to see. From a safe distance. :)

In the upper atmosphere in bits. Possibly at molecular scale.

(I did look up the Earth's rotational speed, getting figures from NASA which I'm told is a more reliable source for stuff like this that Monty Python. It's 1670kph at the equator, or 1038mph. Quite windy, in other words.)

For some reason, I am thinking about the last time I ate lentil phal.

Despite me doing a years tireless campaigning i am very disappointed to see that we are STILL changing the clocks twice a year. What a stupid idea it is.

I think I need to do some more direct action about This important issue next year. I might start putting it on twitter as well.

I agree. Please continue the good work sr.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-26733158
This hadn't even occured to me. People who have their birthdays on the day the clocks change lose a whole hour of their day!!

There is simply no end to the negative impacts that this outdated and deeply impractical practice has. We need to take action to make sure that it doesn't happen in 2015.

I just found out that William Willett is the great great grandfather of Chris Martin from Coldplay!!

http://o.canada.com/entertainment/music/daylight-saving-times-coldplay...

I thought he was a cvnt before. Now I think William Willett should have been thrown into the sea at birth.

GAH! They've done it again! Bastards!

Of course putting the clocks back gives you an extra hour in bed, so it isn't as bad as the sheer horror that is waiting for us in spring.

Russia know the score:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-29773559

Sensible fellows.

My daughter doesn't do clock changes, so I get up at 5 now.

*bangs fist on table*

British Summer Time?! It's raining! We never used to have that before we moved to BST.

Does thisa mean its darker today or lighter.

It's lighter but I think that's because our orbit is closer to the sun than yesterday, the daylight starts a bit later, but there will be more daylight in the early evening after work

Does thisa mean its darker today or lighter.

No - that was yesterday.

Since there have been no new posts since Wednesday, I thought I'd bump this and complain about the clocks changing again.

Perhaps if I LOL too then maybe it will get the name and shame thread moving too...

Naturally our baby doesn't understand about the clocks changing so I have been wide awake since 4am. William Willett I hate you.

Some people got another hour of sleep.

I got another hour of beautifully sunny Sunday morning.

Thank you, William Willett, for your outstanding contribution to our society!

I got an extra hour unpaid work... Henry your a c@nt.

Pointless and silly.

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