Fall back

The extra hour...

I wandered round the house this morning turning the hands of clocks back an hour, or pressing the bleepy buttons until the displays read 8.20am instead of 9.20am. 

I never remember to do them before I go to bed and then, in the morning, I feel cheated because I haven't had that extra hour and I'm awake in that liminal time, the mythical sleep space from which we're supposed to wake, stretch and then realise, with a self-satisfied sigh, that we've beaten the system and snatched some time back from the relentless onward march. 

It has a strange quality, that hour. I'm here, awake, in the kitchen, making tea, letting the cat out, then in, then out while the dog watches and waits for the distant walk time. It feels as though I'm the only person awake, anywhere. A bit like getting up early on New Year's Day, or back in the day when the boys were babies and I'd be blearily feeding them in the early hours and feeling out of synch with the world.

Clocks are hard task masters. We live without them... I mean, we don't need them to live. But we can't live without them because someone, somewhere, decided to split the day into 24 hours and then schedule meetings!

According to the 24hourtime website https://24hourtime.info/history/ the Egyptians and Babylonians divided the cycle of stars appearing in the sky every night into 12 sections and the days were divided into 12 to match. Hence the 24-hour clock. The mechanical timepieces we have now derive from the bells used in religious and other communities to mark the passage of time in cloudy Northern Europe where it was more difficult to see stars. The word clock comes from the medieval Latin 'clocca', meaning 'bell'. 

Getting back to me, and now, I've missed my extra hour in bed and the day will undoubtedly seem very long, but it will be dark by late afternoon and the evening will stretch interminably ahead. Only 154 sleeps until the clocks go forward again...