Busted

It always leads to utter confusion in our house.

All through yesterday there was a frequent interrogation as to "what actually is the real time?".

The cause of this uncertainty was the marking of the end of British Summer Time and the changing of the clocks.

We have the same argument every year as to whether it is a case of the putting them forward or adjusting them back. This is in spite of the mantra learned from childhood alongside the likes of "Every Good Boy Deserves Food", "Richard Of York Gave Battle in Vain", "Thirty Days has, etc, etc" of spring forward and fall back for the seasons of the change in the hour.

We have of course had a few near disasters of time keeping in the family and that is why just one of our number is entrusted to physically alter all of the timepieces in the house.

In the past everyone and I suspect even the family pets, took it upon themselves to carry out this task resulting in not just the loss of gain of one hour dependant upon the season but multiple hours.

To confuse the issue many of the new appliances and gadgets in the house automatically account for the change and as if by magic, overnight, do it themselves.

Many of those I have spoken to on the subject of this impromptu time travel just go to bed early on the saturday night and sleep through in a state of oblivion rather than stress out as I do.

I was determined that this year would be ordered and civilised and so I calculated when to set the alarm to arise at my normal 6am sunday start. A smart phone is so called because it does a lot of smart things without being asked. The outcome was that I leapt out of bed, ready to complete a whole lot of outstanding paperwork but at the unearthly hour of 5am.

It took a random sampling of the mantel clock, digital watch, cooker display and the LCD on the front of the DVD player to realise that I was up and about under, frankly, bogus pretences.

Consequently, the first day after the end of BST always seems to be inexplicably long, tiring and with the early onset of dusk, wholly demoralising.

I was therefore relieved to get back to some semblance of normal with today being a working day.

A bit stupified from lack of sleep in the preceeding 24 hours I got into the car only to see that I was horribly late for my first meeting at the office. Traffic was fairly normal even at that peak rush hour time but I put that down to it being school half term.

I rang ahead to announce my impending late arrival but the meeting must have already started as no-one could find time to answer.

Surprisingly I could get parked easily in front of the office, a first.

Unusually my colleagues had locked themselves in and must have been discussing issues in a darkened room as the blinds were still drawn.

I burst in through the inner door hoping , by diversionary tactics, to produce a laugh at my tardiness. The office was empty and quiet.

Had I got the wrong venue after all, I thought to myself.

Switching on my desk top PC I noticed the time. It was a good hour behind that displayed on the dashboard in my car. It all then became abundantly clear that once again I had failed to adjust that particular keeper of time. I was not so much angry at my own oversight as disapointed in the engineering credentials of Volkswagen in not having a smart clock unless of course they just excluded that item of specification for the UK market, out of a unique sense of Germanic humour.