It's the darkness that makes this time of year so miserable. Each day shorter than the last, until it's hard not to believe that British daylight is shortly to come to a permanent end.
The clocks go back tomorrow. It makes no difference to how much light we get. Some journalist writing annual columns suggesting it would be so much better to keep them on British Summer Time, and aligned, for the short-daylight months with most of Western Europe.
I'm all for the metric system and the end of all forms of nationalistic chauvenism - but time is based on geography, not the time of our neighbours. Abandon feet and inches, but keep Greenwhich Mean Time, which the rest of the world bases their time on. I've lived in Scotland, and in the shortest months with permanent BST 8.30 would be pitch, pitch blackness.
No. Our islands are too miserably dark for winter. With no one coming up with a hibernation drug (incorporating compensatory life extension), we all need to grow wings and behave like swallows - with so much graceful beauty, and admirable common sense,
