With heavy rain falling from milky, grey clouds and the temperature hovering around a miserable 17c, I could surely be forgiven for thinking autumn was here. I’d be wrong but only because the first day of the meteorological autumn is tomorrow. You call it autumn, I call it winter.
In fact, I regard every single day from 1st September to 28/29th February as winter. Four months where it gets increasingly darker and colder, until it gets really cold from January onwards. There’s not much you can do about it but here’s what I propose.
If I didn’t dislike Coldplay enough, it turns out that changing the clocks in the UK is all down to Chris Martin’s great-great-grandfather William Willett. Willett loved golf and got very cross when evenings drew shorter, curtailing his rounds. From 1907, he campaigned to change the clocks twice a year, saying people could then get up earlier and he could finish his rounds in daylight. I’m afraid I have never been able to get my head round this argument. However, in 1916, Willett finally got his wish, or rather he would have done had he not died the year before. All that trouble for nothing.
That, dear reader, is the only reason we change the clocks. People have come up with all manner of other explanations as to why we have changed the clocks but few stand up to scrutiny.
For me, the dark evenings make me feel rubbish. Although I have never seen diagnosed with SAD, so I don’t know if there is another condition I can add to my long list of mental health complaints, but I do know my lessening of the light is literally depressing. Making winter even darker because of a campaign by an amateur golfer over a century ago doesn’t make me feel any better.
There’s little else we can do to make winters more bearable, although I fully expect a liar and charlatan like Boris Johnson to promise just that as the next general election nears.
Summer’s all but gone so let’s enjoy it while we can. If the rain stops, that is.
