in the early days of steam, each town in the UK had its own time. Trains would leave a station according to the local time, which could differ from the time in adjacent towns by several minutes (or more, if a town’s clock was simply wrong!). As commercial connections between towns became ever more important, it was decided to adopt a single time that would cover the whole of the British Isles. The world had shrunk.

Well, the world has shrunk again; and if the British Empire still held sway, I’ve no doubt that the world would now run on ‘Universal Time’ (UT). So what if, on one side of the planet, daybreak would be at, say, 19:18hrs? The numbers are all arbitrary anyway. The main advantage would be that communication would be much simpler; none of this messing about with conversions to local time and the inevitable misunderstandings that result. Archaic, that’s what it is.

Oh, sorry, you were talking about daylight savings time, which is a separate issue. Well, I only have one thing to say about that: lighterlater.org.

However, at the latitude at which London is, the shortest day of the year is 7h20m, whereas the longest is 16h40m. This means that if clocks remained at GMT/UTC all year, summer and winter solstice sunrises would be at 0340 and 0820 hours respectively. Therefore, the reason we put our clocks forward in the summer is to lessen the amount of the year when the sunrise occurs ludicrously early… Clearly, the problem here is our modern insistence of doing everything with reference to clocks: It would be a lot easier if we just went to sleep when it got dark (and in the winter that would probably mean having two sleeps with a break in between)… However, getting back to reality, I can see no practical benefit to not putting the clocks back and forward: Especially since some people in the UK live much further north – where the annual variation in day length is even greater – so the effects of not putting the clocks back and forth would be even worse for them.