Summer Time, and the livin' is easy.....

... Fish are jumpin', and so on. In the UK, we have a daylight saving 'British Summer Time' period which lasts from the last Sunday in March to the last one in October, so that the clocks are put forward by an hour in spring and and back by an hour in Autumn. This is a device dreamed up during the First World War in 1916 to increase weapons production, and extended by a double hour during the Second World War for the same reason. Historically, prior to that, 'Greenwich Time' was standard throughout the UK except for Ireland, where a 'Dublin Standard Time', 23 minutes later and astronomically correct for Dublin, was used-this was abolished with the 1916 legislation. Prior to that, the Greenwich Time had been adopted when the builing of railways required a standard national time for timetabling and signalling purposes. Before that, every parish set it's own church or town square clock to midday when the sun was due south, so time varied according to how far east or west of the Greenwich Meridian you were, though places due north or south of each other showed the same times, assuming thier astromomcal observations were correct and their timepieces accurate. I live in Cardiff, where the correct astronomical time is 13 minutes behind Greenwich. In some parts of South Wales, local time is set at 1980.

Between 1968 and 1971, BST time was used experimentally all year to end the confusion caused by the spring and autumn changes, but eventually abandoned due to worries over schoolchildrens' safety in the dark mornings, the sky not starting to get light until nearly 10 am in the north of the country. Ever since, there have been attempts to re-introduce this 'permanent summer' and another is in the parliamentary pipeline now.

Personally, I would like to see the re-introduction of GMT year round (actually, I favour the re-introduction of astronomical time so that it would be easier to use an analogue watch as a compass, but I don't think that is likely), but I do think that there is a case for arguing that the time adopted is irrelevant, just so long as it is the same all year.

Despite being a devout atheist of many years standing, there is something about all this that smacks of humans interfering with god's sublime creation, and we all know where that leads, don't we, children, remember Dr. Frankenstien! (Devon yokel accent) B'aint natrull, oi tells ee. Trouble'll come of it...

This is one of those issues where I find myself in a minortiy of one, like the use of the death penalty for people who park illegally (their car would be crushed on the first offence, and crushed with them in it on the second, no excuses, no trial, no appeal just summary execution). Ok nurse, I'll take the nice medication now...

Senile Delinquency

I have just got back from a trip to my local shops (oh, yeah, life on the edge, that's me, no fear....) where an old guy tried to push in front of me in the queue for the till. He didn't get away with it, because I saw him coming and strategically positioned myself to block his gambit.

So he got in behind me, muttered a few things under his breath for 30 seconds or so, and strared hitting me, punching me in the small of the back. I turned round and asked him to stop, and he offered me outside!!! He must've been into his 80s, and appeared to be sober, or at least I couldn't smell booze on hime. I suggested, without being abusive, that he might want to consider the possible consequences of this, calm down and behave himself, and leave me alone, and he promptly stated that he wasn't afreid of me and repeated his offer.

I further suggested that he was a silly old sod and again asked him to leave me alone, which fortunately he did this time , though contineing to mutter under his breath in a way that suggested he was not being entirely complimentary to me, my parentage, or anything else to do with me.

Had the situation developed, I would, I confess, have been at a loss as to how to deal with it. On the one hand nobody wants to start knocking pensioners around, on the other I was being physically assaulted. Bad enough that I had to infer a threat of violence to dissuade the bugger; if he'd persisted would I have been right to back the threat up with actual argy-bargy, or should I have let the bloke hit me without response. I suppose if push had come to shove, I'd have had to defend myself, but I was seriously glad that there would have been plenty of bystanders to have witnessed what had led to my aciton. I hope I would have avoided physical abuse, but, as I say, I will not allow violence perpetrated no me to go unchallenged. I do not go around punching other people and consider myself justified in demanding that they do not do so to me.

I con't believe i'd have hit the poor old sod, but I may well have resorted to pushing hime away in order to prevent his hitting me! Suppose he'd been pushed over and actually injured himself. Cue assault charges and court case against me for something someone else caused.

I really must try and get rid of the big neon sign saying 'victim' which apparently floats about 2 feet above my head at all times, as I have an unfortunate habit of attracting this sort of behaviour, in the same way that the nutter on the bus always goes out of his way to set by me. I am fed up with the way the world treats me . Just you all wait till I get my AK47....

Well done Chile!

Lovely to have some good news for a change, and the success of the rescue of the Chilean miners after 10 weeks is a real cheeruper! Chile is not a 3rd world country, but at the same time not the sort of place you'd call at the cutting edge of technology. Nonetheless, they have put on a magnificent rescue effort, and a tremenduous example of what humans can do when they put thier minds to it; and they have been rewarded with success.

The little capsule, 'Fenix', is the real life version of Thunderbirds' 'mole', but in actuality little more than a tin can whose success (fingers crossed as the rescue is proceeding as I type) depends on the straightness and smoothness of a remarkably small shaft, drilled at an angle with amazing precision over a considerable distance. The thing is winched up and down on a steel cable-no high tech here, but it works1 I cannot help but smile as miner after miner emerges and is swamped by hugs from his delighted family. The media are making a meal of it, of course, and Chile's president is making political capital out of it, but not too much so in all fairness, and who in fairness can blame them. This is one of those few news stories that anyone anywhere can take nothing but pleasure in-just plain heartwarming.

And I've needed it, as the darker side of humanity has been intruding into my poor little existence. I've managed in the space of one week to lose a bicycle and a mobile phone to thieving wastes of skin. Not a good week! I will resist the temptation to have a rant about the state of society, the morality of the sort of people who thieve off others. Bikes and phones, even annoyingly uninsured ones, are only things, which can be replaced when the money eventually allows it-Chilean miners are people, and much more important. Kudos to those who didn't give up on them in the bleak early days when it would have been easy enough to simply assume there were no survivors.