Timely advice

The argument about which clock time to follow is avoiding what seems to me the more important question of whether to change clocks at all. Russia has just decided to stop doing it, citing a reported increase in suicides after clock changing.

My own experience of changing clock times is not typical, I hope, but is a weird combination of acrobatics, mind stretching and frustration – enough to drive any normal Russian closer to suicide.

I climb up on rickety stools and ladders to fix the wall clocks first. I survive, but it is a crazy form of exercise.

I then do the easy ones – bedside clocks that use a simple knob to change the position of hands.

Next come the technical nightmares. My digital wrist watch insisted that October only had 30 days as I fiddled with its tiny knobs.

It took three days to convince it otherwise.

The handbook for my cooker clock tells me to press knobs that do not exist, and keeps me quietly frustrated for another hour.

My car clock also needs the hand book in hand, although it is very simple and transparent.

I am a reasonably intelligent, healthy and active senior citizen, and I often wonder how well the rest of the world copes.

Why do we change the clocks anyway? Farmers are more driven by the needs of livestock, weather and markets. Schools are capable of altering their starting and stopping times if there is a local accident risk.

Many employees on flexitime are not as 9 to 5-bound as we once were. We get no more sunlight by doing it, although Scottish paranoia likes to blame the SOB (South of the Border) authorities.

Zander Wedderburn

Lennox Street

Edinburgh

Lesley Riddoch (Perspective, 31 October) erroneously repeats the “hoary old chestnut” that the United Kingdom is the “odd country out” in Europe as we use Greenwich Mean Time.

Not so. There are three countries in Europe which use GMT – the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland and Portugal. So do the Spanish Canary Islands.

The “odd country out” is in fact France, as France is the only country out of the five countries of Atlantic Europe, none of whose territory uses GMT.

Peter Seivewright

Lintfieldbank

By Coalburn, Lanarkshire