Wasting time

This morning, I wasted 18 minutes and 25 seconds trying to change all the clocks in the house to accommodate the undoing of what they ironically call “daylight saving”.

There is now quite a bit of evidence, I think, that messing around with the clocks does do measurable damage to people’s health. There is a modest increase in the number of heart attacks etc following these time changes.[1]

For sure, I find it utterly infuriating. In this household, the most irritating of these clocks is the Miele oven.[2] I failed to identify the peculiar sequence which is necessary to change the time. Darling tut-tutted at me, and purported to do it. In fact, what she had done was set the oven timer. And so, in addition to the 18 minutes and 25 seconds, I had to look it up on the Internet. That took me another ten minutes or so. I did not attempt to delve into the programmes for the irrigation timers, or the weather station. That would have been another 20 minutes or so. They will just have to be wrong throughout the winter. Furthermore, it is not possible to move the hands back in an hour on my grandfather clock, which was built in the 18th century. You either have to painstakingly advance it by eleven hours, listening to the chimes eleven times, or to stop the clock, and remember to start it again an hour later (which is what I did).