Time

Time is a fascinating concept. It is said that in our three dimensional universe, time is the fourth dimension which just goes to show that theoretical physicists have a sense of humour. It does weird stuff too, like move at different rates according to how fast the observer, or indeed the observed, is moving with the result that airline pilots age quicker than their sloth like companions back on terra-firma. Or is it slower? The whole subject is a difficult one for we mere mortals to grasp, stuck as we are in time’s unerring grasp. Time played a big part in my job. There were clocks everywhere and both actual and predicted times were fundamental in keeping the planes apart. You would have thought that now I don’t have to do that stuff any more I could let the arrow of time do its thing without worrying about it too much. Not true I’m afraid. Now I’ve got more time on my hands and more time to fill. Virtually any retiree you speak to will say they don’t have enough time, they don’t know how they managed before when they had to allocate so much time earning a wage. I hope I will be saying the same thing after I’ve given this retirement thing my best shot.

One thing retirement should have given me is the chance to have a stable sleeping pattern. Shift work puts the mockers on that and I’d been doing shift work for thirty-six years. Having said that I was working a wholly predictable shift pattern so my body did get into some sort of routine, even if that routine was spread out over ten days. The most disruptive part of that cycle was the night shifts of which there were two. Studies on shift working have shown that working just two consecutive night shifts is probably the worst combination you can do so it is a surprise that any of my colleagues and I have survived beyond fifty. I went part-time a year before I retired which meant losing the night shifts and I have to say it was a great move. I never realised how much they disrupted your life until they were gone and it was a great way to ease me into the situation where the morning and afternoon shifts were gone too. Six or seven weeks into retirement, however, and I’m still waking up too bloody early.

6am is not a time to be lying awake and being unable to get back to sleep. Of course the virtuous thing to do would be to get up, eat a few dried grains covered in yoghurt then nip out for a six mile run and be back in time for Carol Kirkwood’s weather forecast on BBC Breakfast. Some people actually do that. I used to pass them my way to a morning shift at work, the silly sods. No, civilisation has dictated, probably wrongly, that we should go to bed about eleven o’clock at night, read for about half an hour, sleep for a solid eight hours, wake up at half past seven, lounge about a bit under the warm duvet and get up at eight. We still get to see Carol reading the weather whilst we munch our toast and jam and can always go for that six mile run a bit later after the school run has happened. Maybe. Waking up at six means you just worry about stuff, mainly the fact that you feel you haven’t had enough sleep. There will be a reckoning of course. That usually comes in the afternoon when the inevitable snooze happens. These insidious little episodes can attack you at any time. I’ve been known to nod off whilst in the middle of writing one of these blogs. The most common scenario, however, is that I’ll just go for a sit down in the conservatory, recline the seat and zzzzzzzzzzzzz. It might be for just five minutes, it might be half an hour but it is going to happen. As a Vogon spaceship guard would say, resistance is useless. I try to justify this brief period of unconsciousness by calling it a ‘power nap’ but I’m fooling no one. I know that you all will be thinking ‘lazy git’. I do too.

All of which brings me on to the reason I’m writing this nonsense at half past six on a Sunday morning. It should be half past seven. British Summer Time ended last night and we reverted to Greenwich Mean Time, or UTC as we knew it at work. Why on earth do we go through this charade twice a year? It is referred to as ‘daylight saving’. What a load of cobblers – we get exactly the same amount of daylight no matter how we set the clocks. Earth doesn’t care. It orbits the sun once a year, the angle axial tilt barely changes and it is that and only that that governs the amount of time that elapses between the sun rising and setting on any particular day. Changing the clocks saves not one second of daylight. It is utterly pointless. I believe that Morocco has recently agreed with my assessment and decided that they aren’t going to change the clocks any more and Moroccan Summer Time will reign in Marrakech for evermore. A fine set of chaps, the Moroccans. I really need to go there sometime.

So there you have it. I have at least filled the ‘extra’ hour we get today by doing something worthwhile, ie, moan about the fact there is an extra hour today for no good reason. There is a move by the EU to put an end to daylight saving and say what you like about that institution, that would be a damn good idea. It is, however now 07:48 GMT or 08:48 according to my body clock and I’ve been awake for hours. I’m off to get my toast and jam. No Carol though, she doesn’t do the forecast on Sundays.