I HATE it when the clocks go back.

My phone updates automatically – that’s no problem. But most of the other clocks I have in the house don’t – the cooker, the kitchen clock, the one on the mantelpiece, my alarm, Ollie’s alarm, his watch, my watch…. The list is endless.

And going back an hour for most of them means going on 23 hours – and then that throws the date out… But I haven’t yet found a way of resetting the dog’s clock. Every evening at 4:30 he sits in his usual ‘my supper please’ place waiting patiently for his dinner. I tell him it’s not 5:30 for another hour and though I know perfectly well that he understands every word I say (understands – not obeys…) he refuses to believe me and gets more agitated.

My own body clock too, needs a bit of resetting. I usually wake up at 6:30. Not any more. For the last couple of weeks it’s been 5:30 – but as I go to bed in ‘new time’, for a week or two I miss an hour of sleep while I readjust.

Some have no problem adjusting to the change. I phoned my insurance company to replace a couple of cracked panes of glass and they seemed surprised it wasn’t a break in. “We brace ourselves for the clock change,” they told me. “It prompts a spate of broken windows and burglaries”

So why do we do it? Moving the clocks forward in the summer was first proposed in 1907 by a William Willett, who was appalled at the waste of daylight in the summer. For years his was the lone voice of a sole campaigner until war broke out when first the Germans and then the English adopted Summer Time to save fuel and money. Sadly poor Willett clocked out a year too early and died in 1915 the year before his idea was adopted.

It stuck, apart from a three year break in 1968 that some of us will remember, when Britain adopted permanent summer time. Winter mornings became extremely dark affairs with children glowing softly like a Ready Brek advert as parents encased them in reflective clothing to prevent the anticipated increase in road traffic deaths. (That was in the days when children walked to school rather than being driven by their parents).

The experiment was short lived; once the three year trial period was up we returned to shifting clocks backwards and forwards as the seasons come and go.

But Barney the beagle remains distinctly nonplussed by this explanation. And though I tried to blame my lack of concentration this last week on an Edwardian eccentric, it cut little ice with of my colleagues, who all seem to take the horological comings and goings easily in their stride. Just six months to go, then Barney gets his supper early and I spend a week arriving late for work