Spring Forward

I made a garden gate this week.  Not that, you understand, the Gordon-Smith garden has been hitherto open to the public to wander in at will.  No, this is an additional gate to stop the ruddy dog howling at the bottom of the garden.

Lucky, the aforesaid Ruddy Dog, only has three legs.  We got him from the dogs’ home in this tripoded condition (I imagine his card was marked as soon as he was called “Lucky” by his previous owner).  He lost his leg by taking issue with a lorry. Despite making a fair old bit of it, the Dumb Chum hates noise.

And, at the bottom of the garden is a street with children racing up and down with roller skates, skateboards, little prams, bikes and all sorts of things with incredibly noisy wheels.  Lucky, taking this as a personal affront, goes and howls through the gate at them.  And, by the way, when I say “howl” I mean it.  It’s not a polite little wuff.  The animal stands there simply baying; take a line through the hound of the Baskervilles in the big scene when it comes tearing out of the Dartmoor mist and you’ll get the idea.

So I made another gate to enclose the area that leads to gate proper, if you see what I mean, solely to baffle the dog.  And, when working on the gate, it was totally weird how quickly the light went once the sun went down.  Yes, yes, yes, I know, night is a well-observed phenomena and has been with us on a fairly regular basis for some time, but we’re so used to having light literally at the click of a switch, it’s strange to have to stop work just because it’s dark.

Next week, after the clocks have Sprung Forward an hour, I’d have another hour of daylight to work in and that extra hour is why, during the First World War, British Summer Time was introduced.  Although the idea was first proposed by an Englishman, William Willett, an early-bird type, in 1907, it took until 21^st May 1916 for the government to be convinced.  Germany and Austria had introduced Daylight Saving Time on 30^th April of that year and that seemed, to some parliamentarians, a good reason why we shouldn’t have it in Britain.   Lord Balfour, obviously a man who wanted to be prepared for every eventuality, asked his fellow peers to consider the plight of twins born during the change of the clock, with the result that the second-born might be held to have been born earlier than the first-born and thus mess up the first-born’s inheritance.  Wow.

Anyway, we got BST and in the Second World War there was double Summer Time.  There’s a story of an American GI out with a girl and looking for some privacy.  When moved on by a policeman, he said in disgust, “Say, doesn’t it ever dark in this country?”  Poor guy.

Don’t forget to put your clocks forward!