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Non-Fiction
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| The Return to GMT | |
| By kitten_princess | ||||||||||
| 30 October 2006 | ||||||||||
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This weekend was the end of British Summer Time, and the arrival of autumn, and of Greenwich Mean Time. First non-fiction piece for a while, but I'm thinking I may go with this vague theme of childhood ending again. Comments, please! :D All childhoods are filled with mystery, mostly due to lack of knowledge, I think. Mine was constantly being filled with more puzzles, more unanswered questions. The three I remember best were the Christmas Mystery, the Microwave Mystery and the GMT Mystery. How can my presents be empty under the tree on 24th December, yet magically filled for Christmas Day? Why is the oven really hot after cooking, but not the microwave oven? Is there anything special about that extra hour at the end of British Summer Time? The Christmas Mystery was solved in 1995, the year of my brother’s first Christmas. (But, since he had barely mastered crawling, yet alone understanding English, his Mystery remained unsolved.) It was a simple matter of crude experiment. Shaking the smaller boxes on Christmas Eve secretly, only to find them already containing the presents I’d been bought. Case closed. The Microwave Mystery was solved four years later, in a science lesson. Some man with a nipple-high belt on his trousers revealed to me that it was not “magic heat” that stopped me from getting burnt; microwaves only agitated water molecules in the food, it didn’t heat the surrounding air. Case closed. The GMT Mystery, the enigmatic quality that the extra hour held, still gripped me. Every year, I promised myself I would see what was so good about that extra hour; every year, I fell asleep, only to be woken by my mother bustling in to change my clock. Until this year. The insomnia that had annoying gripped me over the Michaelmas half term gave me the opportunity to finally see what was in that magic hour. I prepared myself; I ate later, I drank coffee, I avoided watching the sleep-inducing news, and listened to appropriate music (80s pop and club-friendly techno). I spent the last dying hours of Saturday on MSN, talking to a few friends, inquiring about a new boyfriend, or a cheap pair of shoes. Finally, midnight silently announced itself, and I retired to my bedroom a half-hour later. A sip of cold water, and a crunch of popcorn: the accompaniment to my clock’s ticking second hand. I decided that maybe television, my gateway to the rest of the world, would help me in my mission. I scrambled for the remote control in the waves of my duvet, and switched it on. Jonathan Ross. I sighed; surely he can’t help me? I found Teletext, keyed in 606 – “Now & Next” – and discovered, to my dismay, that maybe Jonathan was actually my best hope. After all, I doubted that the snooker, the motor racing, or the late night 75p-a-go game shows would stop to herald the extra hour. Maybe he would. 1:24 am. Borat, the “Kazakhstani” graced Jonathan with his presence. He amused me almost as much as amazed me with his crassness, heavily disguised under an amusingly fake Eastern European accent. Even so, I laughed as hard as one can in the wee hours when, addressing a member of All Saints, he made the subtle link between the pop industry and prostitution with four words - “How much is she?” 1:49 am. Smokey Robinson sat on the coach. (I’d never realised he was a man, especially after hearing “Tracks of my Tears”.) By now, it was getting rather late, and the toll of insomnia was starting to show. I remember letting his rough, yet chocolately, voice run over my ears. I managed to rouse myself enough for 1:59 am. Here it was, the moment I’d waited for. I found Teletext; it would tell me the time. I was hoping to see a dramatic change, maybe a flash of light, a spark, anything? 1:59:59 came… and went, followed by 2:00:00. What? That can’t be right. Where was my magic hour? Where were the fanfares, the fireworks, the dancers celebrating, the people rejoicing at an extra hour in bed? As I frowned, and heard Jonathan Ross end his show, I looked up at the screen again. Teletext showed 1:01:39. I nearly cried with disappointment. It had happened. It had happened, right in front of my eyes, and I had missed it! I went to 606 again, to see what was next. Jonathan Ross was programmed to start at 1:00 am (BST), and BBC News 24 would start at 1:05 am (GMT). I dutifully watched through all the trailers for Catherine Tate, Holby City, all those other BBC shows I’d never really cared about before, but now could be a help to me. None of them really were. Then, the “ident”; a ten second clip of pretty images, to warn the viewer that a programme was about to start. A male voice with no body muttered something about putting the clock back, then the opening credits of the news brushed by. “It’s 1:05, and the headlines.” A woman dressed too smart for the hour talked of anguish in some far away country. I stopped listening, and curled up on the bed, drifting into my own dreams of anti-climax and unfulfillment. That was it. The last of the Childhood Mysteries gone. All I had left now were the Grown Up Mysteries, the ones concerning drinks and dark nights, troublesome marriages, stormy relationships. The future. I guess that now, all the hour means to me is that I regained the hour I “lost” sometime in the spring. Case closed.
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