Let there be light, and at better times of day

We already drive on the left, give road distances in miles and drink pints. So one good feature of Brexit is that Britain will be able to develop a whole series of exciting new idiosyncrasies to annoy continental Europeans. For instance, I am planning to bring a private petition to Parliament demanding that Britain formally adopt the UK tabloid approach to metrication, where all low temperatures are reported in Celsius and highs in Fahrenheit.

A colleague of mine, Pete Dyson, has an idea that might raise the eyebrows of our continental chums. He points out to me that the EU sanctioned dates on which we change our clocks for daylight saving time are holding us back. Pete is a human geographer, so he should know, but just to be sure I checked with my brother who is a bona fide astronomer. It really is pretty dumb.

British Summer Time is a bit of a misnomer. We spend 31 or 32 weeks of every year on summer time, only reverting to GMT (or British Winter Time, as it perhaps should be called) for the remaining 20 or 21. But the days in which we get up an hour later are not evenly spaced around the winter solstice (if they were, we would have put our clocks back on 17 September).

The purpose of daylight saving is to ensure that as many as possible of our waking hours are spent in daylight. If the arrangement were optimised for southern England, we could easily spend the whole year on British Summer Time or synchronise our clocks with France. This, however, would mean that during winters in north Scotland, children would walk to school in pitch darkness and farmers would need to rise long before daybreak to perform their vital work of stuffing antibiotics into the front of cows and pulling milk out of the back.