THE ADVANTAGE TO SLEEPING WITH FOREIGN NERDS

Two oclock
Originally uploaded by rodneylibraries

Thomas and I were lying hugging in bed on Saturday night in the dark. We have a very cool (if nerdy) radio controlled digital projection alarm clock. As if by telepathy, as often happens between Thomas and I, we had the same thought at the same time: given Anna gets us up a few times some nights and at least once every night, then there was a chance we'd be up at the point in time when the clock reset itself automatically for British Winter time. That would mean we would see whether it counted backwards, or simply changed back one hour. Simultaneously, as I said Wouldn't it be cool if we were awake at 2am? Thomas said Wouldn't it be cool if we were awake at 3am? Weird! Who was right? We checked wikipedia - we both were - the UK changes to winter time at 2am, Denmark at 3am. I had always assumed everyone did it at 2am, he had assumed the same of 3am, but of course we have to all shift at the same time for the time difference to stay the same - it is so obvious, but I wouldn't have learned it from hugging a fellow Scot. Even more interesting in wikipedia is the fact that despite this being seemingly the only obvious way to do it in retrospect, the States does it differently - with everywhere switching at 2am locally, thus completely knocking out time zones all over the country temporarily, and in Australia they don't even change on the same day. Suddenly Europe seems to be the only sane place to live... did I say suddenly???