Putting the Clocks Back in the Church of England

And yes I suppose I'd better start by suggesting that the current position on LLF has put the clocks back to 2019.  Just for anyone who followed a link here on the assumption that's what the title means. 

But really I was talking about the real physical clocks in the C of E. And the real physical people who have the jobs of putting them back ready for Greenwich Mean Time tonight.

At 2 am the clocks go back. Which is great, if you're talking about a clock on a phone or computer, which does it for you automatically. Or even a church clock with a special mechanism that talks to a satellite. But not so great if it's a clock in a church tower with a big old mechanism that's been patched up for the last 200 years. 

And not if you have a very fastidious village that expects the clock to be right at all times. So what can you do?

You go over to the church tower at just before 2 am. You climb the tower, having used the key that fits upside-down into the clock and goes round backwards. You remember that the mechanism is so complicated that you only know how to change the clock forwards. You realise that moving it forwards 23 hours will take you a very long time and be extremely painful on your winding arm. And that you can't see from the inside what time the clock is showing on the outside.

So you disconnect the mechanism or switch off the electricity supply, according to preference and clock type. And wait an hour.

It's a little known fact* that all over England between the hours of 2am and... erm.... 2am on the last Saturday of October, there are people brushing bat droppings out of their hair, and shivering up village church towers.

And it gets worse. Because stopping the time in the middle of the night in the week leading up to Halloween has a terrible effect on the local spiritual wildlife.

I'm not talking about the young people Uber-ing back from the nightclubs in the nearest town, wondering whether their parents will still be up. But you go messing with church clock time in the middle of an autumn night, you can get who-knows-what rocking up in the tower. 

Take Sir Hemsby Buttercliffe. For the last 200 years, he was walked from his crypt every night at 3am to go to his old Manor House and demand to know why his widow remarried. You stop the clock at 2am and his shade is on tenterhooks. He's likely to stomp up the tower and start pointing at his pocket watch. Not least because he's never really understood BST, and he can't remember whether to go forwards or backwards.

And then any local Black Shucks are going to be fretting about how long it is till daybreak. And Herne the Hunter and the Wodewose are going to be there, offering to give you technical advice. 

Never take it. Wodewose's technical advice only every consists of telling you to hit things with wooden clubs.

So should you wake in the night, around 2.30 am, before you roll over and go back to your extra hour's sleep, consider the clock-minders of England. It's gonna be a long night,

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* because it's not true, I just made it up for an amusing (hopefully) post