Spring forward, fall back

In the early hours of the morning on Sunday 30th March the clocks moved forward an hour for British Summer Time. The clocks changed in Europe too and in the US and Canada the clocks had already moved forward an hour. We all welcome the longer evenings, but how much do we think about time? We certainly talk about it a great deal: research by Oxford Dictionaries has shown that 'time' is the most commonly used noun in the English language.

Our fascination with time goes right back to the Bible: 'To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven'. The practical inventor Benjamin Franklin coined the saying 'Remember that time is money', but while his contemporary Lord Chesterfield took the analogy further 'I recommend to you to take care of minutes: for hours will take care of themselves' the American humorist Will Rogers was less enthusiastic: 'Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save'.

The elastic nature of time has always attracted comment. Albert Einstein, the founder of the theory of relativity, thought that 'The distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, however persistent', while on a more mundane level Parkinson's law states that 'Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion'. The critic William Dean Howells pointed out that 'Some people can stay longer in an hour than others can in a week'.

It was the Roman poet Virgil who first said 'irretrievable time is flying', but the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre who complained 'Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do'. The actress Tallulah Bankhead had a different problem. On receiving an invitation for 9 a.m. she exclaimed, 'Oh, are there two nine o'clocks in the day?'

Another Roman poet, Ovid, gave us a vivid image of the power of 'Time, the devourer of everything'. But A. A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh reminds us of a more domestic aspect with 'Time for a little something'.

At least the hour we lose changing to British Summer Time is regained every autumn (hence 'Spring forward, fall back'). When the calendar was reformed in the mid eighteenth century, the date moved directly from 2 to 14 September, prompting the protest slogan 'Give us back our eleven days'. But the eleven days never returned. Shakespeare, as always, summed up: 'Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back, Wherein he puts alms for oblivion'.

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