Paul Hopkins: Clocks going forward lights up my life

There is a decided spring in my step, now that I'm over losing an hour's sleep last weekend as the clocks went forward. I'm delirah and excirah... delighted with the light of an evening – and it feels good to be alive.

The clocks going forward have time on their hands when it comes to our health. The extra light promotes more activity in the evening which is good for general fitness and, indeed, good for businesses – pubs, restaurants, late-night shopping. Numerous studies suggest that sunlight is good for you, with an uplift in mood due to higher levels of serotonin in your brain. So you can shake away the winter blues and lethargy and embrace increased levels of happiness and motivation that comes with more hours of daylight.

It's good for the environment too, with people using electricity less with longer daylight hours. A bonus, given the rising, crazy costs of such and they go up, yet again, this month.

People generally feel happier, more energetic and have lower sickness rates in the brighter days after clocks change. Apparently, sex drive increases – I say apparently – and carb cravings lower and the Seasonal Adjustment Disorder (SAD) improves once people feel the effects of spring and the longer daylight hours.

Also, you can ditch all those heavy layers of thermal winter clothing needed to stave off the cold and rain and switch to lighter summer and spring attire. Although, please, men of a certain vintage should not be going around in shorts. My bugbear are those hordes of men who don shorts at the first sign of an Irish summer. More specifically men over a certain age, an age when they really should know better; who assail my senses with those visions of knobbly knees, bow legs or flat feet, pot-bellied or worse, attired in shorts of all shades and shapes that do nothing to enhance their standing in the community.

Here’s my rationale: if we men are planning on making a century, then the age of 50 is a speed hump we just have to get over. It's like surviving a Wednesday during the working week; you can crawl under your office desk and sob, or you can be a man and face your demons. The best knack to getting over the middle of your life is to do it with as much grace and elegance as possible. So, no shorts, please. As Bart Simpson would say, eat them...

(Okay, okay, I admit it: I have a pair of torn jeans somewhere at the back of the wardrobe and I have a collection of Converse footwear that would have been the envy of Imelda Marcos but I draw the line at wearing shorts in a summer that is Ireland).

So now, winter is behind us and the summer is coming. Okay, we can’t guarantee the weather will be perfect, but it’s generally on an upwards trend with warming air and less horrid conditions to contend with.

Finally, the person to blame for having felt robbed of that hour last weekend is one William Willett (the great-great-grandfather of Coldplay’s Chris Martin) who was born in Surrey in 1856. While out horse-riding early one sunny morning he noticed that most people were fast asleep in their beds. What a waste of good daylight he thought and in 1907 he wrote, and self-published, a pamphlet called The Waste Of Daylight.

Willett suggested that not only would people get an extra hour of daylight to enjoy by putting the clock forward but at a time when public lighting was turned off during the night more than two million old pounds could be saved in lighting costs! Willet’s idea was well received by David Lloyd George (Prime Minister of the UK (1916-1922), Arthur Conan Doyle (the creator of Sherlock Holmes) and by Sir Winston Churchill.

Yet, despite its obvious advantages it was not introduced. It wasn’t until the horrors of the First World War and with coal running desperately short that Willett’s proposal gathered momentum. In fact the Germans, suffering their own fuel crisis, passed their Daylight Saving Bill first in April 1916. Great Britain, then including Ireland, passed its own a month later. William Willett never got to witness the introduction of his bright idea as he died in 1915.

Speaking of hours, let's close with that old adage – may we all be in Heaven an hour before the Devil knows we’re dead.