It’s five o clock in the afternoon and already dark – let the long winter evenings begin!
Part of me struggles to understand why we continue with this strange phenomenon of shifting between Greenwich Mean Time and British Summer Time, but it’s one of the few remaining certainties that remain in what have become increasingly uncertain times. Introduced in 1916, in the midst of the First World War, the intention was to give farmers an extra hour in the morning to work, but it seems that today’s farmers are rather more open-minded about the situation. In many ways in depends on your work pattern, and this will differ depending on the nature of your farm. Having now been the annual norm for several generations I find it unlikely that we will ever revert to a single time, but it’s certainly not beyond possibility.
I’ll leave you this weekend with a rather wonderful sunset that popped up on my twitter feed a little earlier. Wishing you all the best for the new week. I’m already looking forward to next weekend when I’ll be heading up to the Allerton Project in Leicestershire which is playing host to an event I’ve been organising on behalf of A Focus on Nature and the National Federation of Young Farmers Clubs. I won’t say much about it now as a full report will be given afterwards. Rather excited though to be bringing young conservationists and young farmers together for the first time in this way.
thinkingcountry.com 
Many people still shudder at their recollections of the 1960s experiment to continue BST into the British wintertime. The dark mornings were dangerous and the early evenings no lighter than they are now (children were travelling both to and from school in darkness).
This morning the sun rose at just after 7.15 am in the south-east of England. With so many farmers having to supplement their income with employment ‘off-farm’, and fit in their livestock rounds, etc, around those commitments, the notion of pitch-dark mornings in winter makes no sense to me. I hope that our exit from the EU will end once and for all the various mutterings in favour of BST in winter and BST+1 in summer, with their fallacious claims that we will somehow obtain ‘more’ light. The light levels we have, at all times of the year, are an inescapable fact of life at our latitude.
Not living in the UK any more, I have to keep an eye out for the clock changes.
Lovely sunset – whatever time it was! 🙂