Maybe a time for change as our evenings disappear

It’s that week of the year when time and clocks tend to take centre stage in terms of trivia debates as we imagine ourselves either losing or gaining an hour this weekend. Of course, we neither lose or gain anything in terms of time as the clocks are purely a mechanism to put some kind of order on the changing order of light and darkness as the seasons change.

The ‘changing of the clocks’ has always tended to ignite some heated debates in hostelries about when it’s going to happen and whether the timepieces go forwards or backwards. The little mnemonic of: ‘Spring Forward and Fall Back’ is probably the easiest memory guide to what happens each year on the last Sundays of March and October.

Some years back, I remember a fair bit of confusion arising when one newspaper (which will be nameless) made the little faux pas of getting the time change the wrong way around and it sparked off a fair bit of reaction. (At least it was an indication that the paper was being). So, for the record, remember at 2am on this Sunday morning to put back the clocks by one hour.

It will mean an extra hour of ‘grace’ in terms of a little sleep-on this Sunday morning although I do find that with the passing of years, our bodies tend to have their own internal sleep and wake-up mechanisms, completely independent of any clocks or early morning alarms.

What we would all like to do is to slow down time just a little bit but it is of course a futile objective with the great wheel of life tending to speed up with each passing season and year.

That pace of time movement, is I’m convinced, all the quicker when working in newspapers, as one deadline after the next looms, and stories and columns sometimes are written a week in advance. Utterances often fly around a newsroom such as: “Sure our next edition couldn’t be the first Friday in November,” followed by sombre replies of: “I’m, afraid it is. Christmas is only around the corner.”

My only real feeling of time standing still, or at least close enough to it, was of our times in secondary school when the day seemed to go forever and especially the odd ‘double class’ here and there with a teacher who put a shiver of fear down our spines. For that 80 minutes or so, time did seem to be frozen: after every second, there seemed to be a pause.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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