Metropol

Tis that time of year, people, when we being on the depressing dark evenings.

So time for that annual debate!

Should we stay on GMT+1 all year round? Should we even take it one step further and go to GMT+2 in the Summer months?

And if we're feeling really extreme maybe even GMT+3 in the months each side of June?!

What about Scotland and their dark mornings - is it about time that they were put onto a different timezone and observed GMT all year round?

Does putting the clocks back in Winter actually matter anymore? Is it REALLY needed? Research claims that 450 lives a year can be saved. Indeed the last trial in the late 60s showed a sharp decrease in road accidents.

I personally belive that we should be on GMT+1 over Winter and GMT+2 over Summer, with Scotland adopting GMT year-round.

Whilst I feel that there may be a slight increase in road accidents in the morning, evening accidents would fall dramatically - certainly enough to easily outnumber the morning increase.

Also, people are generally more alert in the mornings that they are at tea time. So we'd cope better with darkness in the morning... and even better we don't have our afternoons turned into night time.

What's everyone else's take?

Great(!)

It will now get dark at 4pm, so travelling home listening to the radio in car with the rain lashing down on the windscreen, windows misting up, stopping every 50 yards for traffic lights, getting wet when you get out of the car in the dark, cold, raining winter evenings.

Lovely, just lovely.

I hate the British winter so much. I wish I was a bird, and could migrate every winter to Australia or somewhere nice.

Jamez wrote:I wish I was a bird, and could migrate every winter to Australia or somewhere nice.

Exactly.

It's at times like this that I could hate channel five announcers!

No, no, no. Who really wants to be a bird this winter, what with avian flu and the predicted mass culling of our feathered friends.

This is the time of year i wish i was a hedgehog or squirrel. Hibernating for the winter.

miss hellfire wrote:No, no, no. Who really wants to be a bird this winter, what with avian flu and the predicted mass culling of our feathered friends.

This is the time of year i wish i was a hedgehog or squirrel. Hibernating for the winter.

Please please Lorna. It's Evian flu. We catch it from drinking water.

Well that's what Anna Blotting keeps saying.

Being fortunate to live in Cornwall it doesn't get really dark until after 4.30pm in the real dark short days of December. I therefore get extremely dark mornings instead. Frequently it's gloomy until gone 8.00am in December.

My 'Solution' is quite radical and preserves the Scottish Farmers concerns who seem to be the ones that protest more than most. I would personally approve of putting the clocks forward from GMT to CET (i.e TWO hours in March and putting them back by two in October). The advantage would be that in Cornwall in June the summer evenings would last until well after 11pm, and the wasted daylight between 4.30am and 5.30am would go.

I very much suspect that the only real change that we might expect in the coming years is advancing the date that we actually move to summer time by two or three weeks, for energy saving purposes.

Good Discussion though.

I hate all this business of putting clocks one hour forth and back (obviously not at the same time ).

I also noted today when I got some cash out of the hole in the wall that the whole Natwest cashpoint network will shut down for a few hours either side to allow for the changes as most of the new cashpoints are Windows run computers.

So much for 24 hour banking!

Do many other nations or continents put clocks forwards & backwards an hour at certain times of the year. I take it CET stands for "Central European Time" but do countries like USA, India, Japan or Australia bother at all?

Yes.

The States and Canada call it Daylight Saving Time.

Australia also does it tonight, except that they're going FORWARD for the summer, so British time and Australian time changes by a TWO hour difference tonight.

Plays hell with Qantas shift times as they work on Sydney time, wherever they are in the world.

Nick Harvey wrote: Australia also does it tonight, except that they're going FORWARD for the summer

Is that because the water goes the wrong way round the toilet down there?

Sput wrote:Is that because the water goes the wrong way round the toilet down there?

Yep.

Except at Christmas on Great Keppel Island, but you'll have to ask Cheesey about that!