In the Summertime...

Yesterday someone at work gave me an extra diary he’d found in the crevices of his desk (that’s a planner, you Americans). I paged through the non-calendar parts, as one inevitably does with a new diary, to check out what random things this company might think I need to have in an easily accessible location. While sizing charts were conspicuously missing (which for the first time in my life might actually be handy), the London Tube, airline reservation numbers, notable dates, UK road distance chart and international direct dialing codes all made the cut. I found myself pausing at the Notable Dates 2008 page, checking to see if the late-May bank holiday had a larger purpose as it coincides directly with our American Memorial Day (it doesn’t), when I noticed the heading under March 30: English Summer Time Begins.

Read about English Summertime...Wow. English summertime begins. It seems a bit forward to me to think of making such a claim so early in the year, but as the daffodils are already blooming, who am I to say? I thought maybe I’d stumbled onto a lovely English holiday where elderly, blue-haired women fret that their flowers won’t be blooming in time this year as they fret every year, and everyone watches the weather report to see if it will be sunny for the annual festivities, which I imagine includes a trip to the beach and an ice cream cornetto (cone) and maybe even some frolicking in fields of flowers or the Yorkshire moors. I mean, who uses the word ‘summertime’ besides song writers and children’s book writers? It really does conjure up happy thoughts.

I was crushed when a neighbour told me that it is, in fact, my very least favourite day of the year: the day we ‘spring forward’ an hour, as my mother says, thereby having a full hour of sleep cruelly stolen from us. We call it Daylight Savings Time, they call it Summer Time. Alas. I like my plans for the 30th of March much better.


(And while I am on the topic of holidays and traditions, how come no one told me before Christmas that a pantomime show is a well-loved English Christmas tradition? I missed seeing Aladdin at the Theatre Royal in Newcastle by a matter of weeks. Any show my co-workers affectionately call ‘The Panto’ is worth my attention. I am so disappointed.)