Seasons, senses & self
Wake Up
Last Sunday in October, 2 a.m.
Time was, an army of clerks in black jackets
would ascend a triple ladder to each town hall clock.
The strongest two would push the hour hand back.
Others would adjust the chime. Of course,
there was a supervisor, and a senior clerk
to write the logbook, his apprentice,
and a double-checker. Now
a single bureaucrat clicks a button
on a screen in Whitehall. Town councils
run on the software he controls; their clocks
(for all their Edwardian faces, hands)
are digitised at core. Each citizen’s
pacemaker is reset centrally. It’s time
to turn the clock back, set the alarm.
Seasons, senses & self 56/365:
Nudging you to... write? reflect? walk? notice? flow?
This is a poem from my book A Place to Keep My Shadow. I don’t know when ‘daylight saving time’ was introduced, but apparently the notion that all clocks in Britain should strike noon simultaneously dates from the introduction of the railway network. Previously, each town clock would show noon when the sun was at its highest in that place – and for Penzance, that’s 22 minutes after Greenwich. But such differences would have made railway timetables very complicated.
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