SPRINGING forward into summer doesn’t always work for some.

I, for one, feel the effects of that lost hour for about a week after, and when out walking the dog at 8am and the mist has not yet cleared over the field I say, “Well, really it is 7am.”

When I visited my grandparents a few weeks ago and they informed me of the impending loss I was about to suffer in my sleep pattern, it sparked a bit of a debate - one that was called British Standard Time for three years.

In March 1968 the clocks were put forward into British Summer Time and weren’t put back until October 1971 in an experiment to see if it really was necessary to make the most of daylight when winter and summer rolled around.

But after these three years, the question of whether it made a difference or not was never really answered for us English folk, and ultimately there were both pros and cons to changing the clocks.

The Department of Transport noted that more people were killed in darker mornings and less in lighter evenings but had just passed a legislation relating to drink-driving, so it was hard to tell if the figures related to the time or the fact that there were less drunk people on the roads than before 1969. But the figures that were taken from Scotland did show that more people had been killed on the road during the experiment.

A White Paper published in 1970 said it was impossible to quantify the advantages and disadvantages of British Standard Time. The experiment was debated in the Commons and by a vote of 366 to 81 the experiment was discontinued. Since then, a number of MPs have tried and failed to change the clocks through private members’ bills, especially from north of the border.

But, if Scotland are going to be independent from us, does that mean we can stay a standard time throughout the year, or will we keep changing the clocks and Scotland can further benefit from the hassle of adjusting to that extra hour, or maybe even two, putting us on British Summer Time and them on Single/Double British Summer Time?

China is 3,704,426 square miles, but the 1.5billion people living there stick to Beijing Time despite it geographically spanning five times zones.

The only thing that could account for why China doesn’t change its time is because they are closer to the equator than we are, 1,400miles as opposed to our 3,450miles, meaning their daylight changes a bit less than ours does when the seasons change.

From my point of view, we don’t benefit from the change. It’s just a hassle of adjusting sleeping patterns, being late/early for work, earning a engineering degree in the six months between to adjust the clock on the oven.

Let’s have another British Standard Time experiment and stop the more than 100 year nonsense.