Séamas O'Reilly: The clocks are going back this evening — apparently

I have, thus, made no secret of the fact that I have no sense of direction. 

If you placed me six streets away from the room in which I’m writing these words, I’d probably die of starvation during the long trek back to familiar ground. 

I’m an inveterate wimp when it comes to either heat or cold, and despise frigid water above all things. 

I salute, and may even hold a certain grudging envy for, those hardy souls who take to sea swimming each New Year’s Day, but I would sooner put a gun in my mouth than join them.

But nowhere do I feel more shamefully incomplete as an adult than in the matter of time. 

A youth spent fetishising digital watches — and an adulthood in which owning any variety of watch has simply never occurred — means that it still takes me a little while to read a clock. 

Most of this time is spent inwardly mumbling about the big hand and the little hand, in the manner of a six-year-old doing his best, by which time I generally concede that I’d have been better off looking at my phone.

I’ve often wondered if this chronophobia has something to do with my similar confusion over daylight savings time. 

If you’re reading this on Saturday, we’re right on its cusp. With a pleasing asymmetry, this time tomorrow won’t even be “this time” tomorrow. It’ll be an hour earlier. I think. 

Despite the fact I have experienced this shift, twice a year, for my entire life, I have never fully learned which.

Actually, this is inaccurate. 

I’ve learned it 77 times but, like the exact meaning of third cousin once removed, or the rules of the UEFA Nations' League, they are things I learn fairly regularly and then banish from my brain immediately afterward. 

And so, twice a year, I spend a day or two sporadically mumbling “spring forward, fall back” to myself, only 90% sure of what, precisely, that means.

BURNING DAYLIGHT

I do not think this is my fault. I’m so sorry to quibble here but it seems evident to me that clocks “going back” could mean either thing, surely? 

If what we think of currently as 10am becomes 9am tomorrow, then the clocks can be said to have “moved back” by one hour. 

This is, I am happy to confirm, the correct interpretation of that phrase, and the situation we are leaning into this weekend.

But, I’m just saying, if 10am becomes 11am — as in spring — then the very same term could conceivably be argued to be appropriate, since “moving a meeting back” on your calendar means rescheduling it for a later time that day.

In today’s age of instantly updating phones and computers, this has little effect on my life, other than bi-annual suite of conversations with people on these very points, which thankfully reveal that most people share my confusion or — at least — are capable of being confused by me once I make my case in the above manner. 

I have certainly never been in a group of, say, four people, who all agreed what time it was going to be the following day. 

I’ve known voices to have become raised in such conversations, tables slapped and diagrams drawn.

Still less, in my experience, do we understand why exactly daylight savings time exists. 

I was reared to believe it was primarily beneficial to farmers and children, allowing them more daylight hours to get their work or schooling done. 

This I accepted without question, even though the exact reason why it’s better to have that hour in the morning than the evening escapes me. 

At times, it conjures nothing so much as my experiences of negotiating the dimensions of an insufficiently large duvet, and the riddle of choosing whether it is your chest or your feet that should freeze overnight.

On Joe Duffy's Liveline the other day, there was a woman standing up to this tyranny of time. She maintained that she didn’t amend her clocks because it did her no good, she said, to change them. 

Listening in the kitchen alongside me, my father-in-law insisted he knew many who were the same in the 1960s and ’70s, hard-chaws from farms in Meath who could be heard asking, many weeks after each such shift of the clock, “is that old time or new time you’re talking about?”.

From that discussion, I learned that Ireland itself had its very own time zone from 1880 until the First World War, known as “Dublin Mean Time” — officially placed some 25 minutes and 21 seconds “ahead” of Greenwich Mean Time. 

For those who suffer from my mild form of dyschronometria, this means that, as Big Ben struck midday in London town, the official time in Ireland would be just 11:34.39am, whether you found yourself in Malin Head or Fastnet Rock.

This came to an end in 1916, when the Time (Ireland) Act coupled it back to our colonial overlords, on a basis so permanent that it has remained preserved almost ever since, through partition, independence, and the forming of the republic. 

This was, it seems, a bullish time for daylight savings, seeing the first such experiments with the form across the globe, as battling states instituted daylight savings time to advance the war effort, many of which maintained it forever after, if sporadically.

Consider, for instance that only four Australian states (and one territory) observe it, and that it is in place in the entire United States, barring Hawaii and, for some reason, Arizona. 

Or that Ireland ditched it entirely in 1968, bringing it back only in 1971. As for why any of this is the case, well, I’m afraid the clock escapes us. That’ll have to be a story for another time.