Tick, tock....

Well, it's coming up to changing the clocks time again - I've had a moan about this before - this time last year in fact. The more I think about it, the more the whole thing seems to be an unnecessary faff. The idea of putting the clocks forward really originated in World War I, and was a perfectly sensible measure designed to maximise the amount of war work which could be done in daylight - you have to remember of course that the standard of artificial lighting back then was pretty poor. Much the same considerations prevailed in the Second World War, when we had the blackout to contend with, so Double Summer Time was introduced, with the clocks two hours ahead of GMT. But what's the rationale today? Certainly factories and offices no longer rely in any way on daylight to do their thing. The usual explanation is that it's for the benefit of the farmers and others who work outdoors, but what I can never understand is that no amount of tinkering with the clocks can alter the amount of daylight available, so how does it matter when that is? In the depth of winter say, you've got somewhere between 6 and 8 hours of daylight, depending on just where you are in these islands, to do whatever you've got to do, so what difference does it make just when that starts and finishes? Please can we take a sensible look at this?