Jonny McCambridge: The clocks go back. Enjoy an extra hour in bed? Not blooming likely

I was visiting family and friends the evening before. They were uniform in cheering the looming adjustment of the time. ‘An extra hour in bed!’, I heard over and over. I smiled along but said nothing. It is only an extra hour in bed if your body permits you to sleep longer, or if your temperament permits you to relax.

I toss and turn through the rest of the night. My constant agitation begins to annoy my wife who eventually enquires of the time.

‘It is 6:13am with the adjusted time, or it would have been 7:13am if the time was not adjusted.’

She mumbles something under the duvet, but I can’t quite make it out.

In fairness, I have some empathy with her general sense of complaint. It is Sunday morning, it has been another busy series of days. This is the one part of the week which should be devoted solely to rest. I try to force myself back to sleep but it will not come. Eventually I concede to the inevitable and haul myself from the bed.

‘Where are you going?’ my wife protests.

‘I have to do the clocks,’ I respond reasonably.

‘You have to do them right now? At this exact moment? It wouldn’t do to wait for a couple of hours?’

My wife and I have been together for a long number of years but occasionally she still will ask me strange questions such as this.

I move through the house in the dark. The old clocks in the conservatory and front room are straightforward, a simple matter of moving the hands back an hour. I turn next to the electronic clocks on the oven and the oil thermostat. It takes me a few minutes to remind myself of the method, but soon they are fixed.

Then I go back up the stairs. The most important clock in the house is the one in my son’s bedroom. It controls what time he rises from bed, which often dictates what time the rest of the house rises from bed. I enter his room. It is too dark to see the workings of the clock properly and my son is still asleep, so I don’t want to turn on the light. I settle for using my phone to illuminate the way.

It is a complicated clock with multiple white buttons and settings. There is probably an instruction manual somewhere, but I decide that it is more practical to proceed with trial and error.

I press a few buttons and nothing noticeable occurs. I press a few more and the face of the clock suddenly becomes brightly illuminated, momentarily stinging my eyes. First it is brilliant white, then green, then lilac before it returns to its previous dull state.

I am heartened and press some more. The sound of bird song fills the room. I panic and thump another button and the birds are replaced by a harsh repetitive bleeping alarm and finally by the crowing of a rooster.

‘What’s going on?’ my son says sleepily, rising from the pillow.

‘Turn that bloody alarm off!’ my wife yells from the next room.

‘Sorry, sorry,’ I say helplessly as I fiddle with the clock.

Eventually, I work out how to adjust the time. I set it using my mobile phone as a guide. I step back but am not quite content. I notice that my phone is changing minute about thirty seconds earlier than the bedroom clock.

‘It won’t do….it won’t do…’ I mumble to myself.

I move the clock forward one minute. But I am equally dissatisfied as this means it is now running about 30 seconds faster than my phone. I repeat the process several times, introducing slight delays, until I have the two timepieces as close to synchronicity as can possibly be achieved.

Then I go outside. It is raining heavily, and I am wearing my pyjamas and slippers. My neighbour is up early and leaving for work.

‘Just changing the time on the clocks in the cars,’ I say jollily as rain runs down my nose. He nods along uncertainly and drives off quickly.

I enter my car and, as I do every six months, locate the user manual to re-educate myself on how to reset the time.

This time things are a bit different. My car has been off the road for several weeks, incapacitated by a series of mechanical issues.

In fact, as I am sitting here in my soaked pyjamas, it occurs to me that the clock may very well be the only part of the car which is in working order. I adjust the time.

Then I move to my wife’s car. With my car requiring repair, I have been using hers and have long noticed that the display time is not set properly. It is an hour off correct. My son has also noticed this and has asked me about it several times. I have smiled along indulgently, recognising a chip off the old block.

I have asked my wife previously if she wanted me to adjust the clock. She responded that we might as well wait until the clocks change and it will right itself. I have no ready answer for this sort of logic. As the lyrics to the theme tune to an old situation comedy once stated, ‘The world don’t move to the beat of just one drum’.

So, I enter her car and ignite the engine just to satisfy myself that the time is now correct. It is not correct. Nor is it incorrect by one hour. The time on the dashboard is now incorrect by two hours.

I sit in the car in the heavy rain. I am nonplussed.