The days are getting longer, lighter and all-round lovelier meaning one thing: we are officially in spring. Finally.
We now (hopefully) have months of sunny days ahead of us to look forward to after an oh-so-long winter.
There’s just one caveat to all of this merriment — we will be ‘missing’ one hour’s sleep this weekend coming. Yup, that’s right, the clocks are going forwards and we lose a sweet, sweet hour of sleep in return for even longer days.
When do the clocks change in the UK?
As with every year, the clocks change to British Summer Time on the final weekend of the month of March, meaning that the clocks go forward by an hour on Sunday 30 March at 01:00 GMT.
If you’re an early bird, you may notice that the mornings are a little darker as of next week but rest assured, the evenings will be lighter for longer and you’ll likely still soak up lots of precious Vitamin D.
Why do the clocks change?
Originally, this was actually suggested by an American politician and inventor as a solution to spending far too much money on candles. However, it was builder William Willett who brought the idea to the UK in 1907 when he published his leaflet, The Waste of Daylight which encouraged the UK public to wake up earlier.
He believed, like our mother’s when we were teenagers, that Brits were ‘wasting the day’ by sleeping through periods of time when the sun had already risen and argued that the change would save fuel during the war.
Interestingly, he was also a golfer and didn’t like that precious course time to go to waste.
Parliament passed the Summer Time Act, which brought the change into widespread use, in 1916 – a year after Willett died.
Happy British Summer Time when it comes!