Let there be light

I HAVE spent many hours sitting on a sandbank in the middle of Morecambe Bay cursing farmers.

I was reminded of the wasted hours by the prospect of the change to British Summer Time last weekend.

The whole thing seems to be based on the belief that dull-witted agriculturalists will trudge in from the fields at the same time each day because "Missus always 'as dinner on table at six sharp and it'll go in't pig swill if I'm five minutes late."

The bright boys in the London HQ of the Ministry of Agriculture worked out that if they started calling 6pm 7pm, farmers would be none the wiser, but would get more work done as the cockerels, which don't conform to British Summer-time, would continue to get the farmers up around dawn.

For those of us who mess about in boats in the shallow waters of Morecambe Bay, summer-time is not so convenient as all tide tables are printed in Greenwich Mean Time.

Forget to add an hour and you can be left high and dry for several hours until the water flows back.

Get it really wrong and go aground near the top of a spring tide and you could theoretically be stuck for a fortnight, until the next round of big tides.

Ideally I would like to see British Summer Time abandoned, but if the powers that be are intent on national system specifically designed to improve life, it would surely be better to introduce British Winter Time.

At present most of us go to work in winter just as it is getting light and emerge again just as it is getting dark.

That's no way to live.

We should put the clocks back six hours from November to the end of March, then we can have light evenings all year round.

BODY OF EVIDENCE

A FRIEND tells me how his firm gives them annual health checks and one of his colleagues was told by the doctor that he was very overweight.

"But I have always been heavy," he replied.

"What is the lightest you have been?" asked the doctor.

"6lbs 3 oz."

Email: dennis.aris@kendal.newsquest.co.uk