Oh dear! I shall be too late!

Sleep's a funny thing for we older people. Put me in front of the telly or set me to reading in the garden and I'll soon be snorting away and dribbling onto my shirt. On the other hand staying asleep in bed is a problem. If it's not the bladder or my aching back then I just get bored. So today was quite odd because, when I first looked at my watch it was nearly 10am. That's the day gone I thought.

Getting up late on Sunday isn't a venal sin or anything but it does have a big disadvantage in Spain. It basically knocks out any daytime events.

Most people know that the Spanish tend to eat late - lunch from around two but maybe as late as four and dinner from maybe nine till around ten thirty. Summer times can be later. I remember reading a Blasco Ibañez (1867-1928) book where the family were preparing a grand lunch for friends and they were planning to eat at twelve thirty. I wondered at the time if the more modern, later, meal times were to do with changes in the working day and then promptly forgot all about it. I was reminded of the earlier sittings recently with the debate that has been going on about ending the clock changing that goes on every March and October. In a radio discussion someone was arguing that clock time and schedules were different things. He said that, before the time in Spain and France was moved to coincide with the time in Nazi Germany, Spaniards had always eaten at around one in the afternoon. When you think about it as Spain sets down to eat at 2pm the clocks are chiming one in England. In turn that made me wonder what the UK will do when the rest of the Union stops changing its clocks. Maybe the staunchest of Britons will argue for proper British time, GMT, to go along with blue pàssports and non pink driving licences.

So Spanish morning events almost inevitably finish at around 2pm. Markets and selling events will start to pack away even before that time. If you have an all day event everything will re-open for the evening session anytime after 5 or 6pm but if it's an evening only event it can start anytime from 8pm to midnight even in Autumn. Summer start times for evening events are often around either side of midnight. So, as I rubbed the sleep from my eyes this morning and looked at that 10am watch I knew that it was unlikely we'd be going anywhere much today.

In the dark

One of the things that tourists in Spain often find a little odd is the Spanish working day. Whilst there are as many variations as you can imagine the basic structure is that people work in the morning, have a long break in the middle of the day and go back to work for the evening. A local shop, for instance, would probably open at 10, close at 2, re-open at 5 and close for the day at 8.30. This means that most people have lunch between 2 and 3.30 and have their evening meal after 9.30.

In Portugal it's the same time as in London. In Madrid the London time is advanced by an hour. When people sit down for lunch at 2pm in Madrid it's also lunchtime in London, except that there it's 1pm.

After a conference in 1884, that established the current time zones, Spain slotted in to the same zone as the UK. Then in 1940, apparently in a move designed simply to please Adolf Hitler, Franco changed Spanish time to that of most of the rest of Europe.

There has been talk in Spain, for years, of trying to rationalise the working day. Critics say that the split reduces productivity and increases time spent travelling to and from work. This week the Government said that it was in favour of changing the working day, so that it generally finished at 6pm rather than 8pm, and doing away with the long lunch break.

Fair enough I suppose. Choose your argument. But at the same time all the press reports said that would also mean going back to the "proper" time zone. The argument being that if it gets darker earlier people would be keener to go home (honest, that's what they said).

The time zones fan out from the Greenwich Meridian. Last time I looked Greenwich was reasonably close to the Dover and Newhaven and other places that act as ports for ferries across the Channel to France. People swim the channel so it can't be very wide. Yet, on the beach at Dieppe or Calais it's the same time as in Spain. So is France in the wrong time zone too? And the answer is apparently yes. It's to do with that same bloke Hitler and him capturing France. Oh, I should mention that the Canary Islands which belong to Spain, are on London time. From my reading of a time zone map they should be two hours behind Madrid and an hour behind London.

I would be dead against moving Spanish time back to London time if only for the simple reason that it makes Winter much less miserable. It doesn't get dark here till 6pm even in the depths of December. Equally, in Summer, because we're farther South, we don't get the light nights of Northern Europe and sunset on the longest day is currently around 10pm. I prefer lighter evenings in summer too.

By the way I kept saying London time to avoid the UCT/GMT/BST thing.