Daylight Saving Time Ends on Sunday, and One Hour Will Happen Twice

At two o'clock on Sunday morning, across most of the United States, the clocks will fall back to one, and an hour that has already happened will happen again. Britain and much of Europe did the same last weekend, so by Monday a good part of the world will have lived through the same sixty minutes twice and thought almost nothing of it. I think it deserves more attention than it gets, and not because of the extra sleep. The night the clocks go back is the one night of the year when anyone can see, plainly, that a clock is a witness and not a fact.

We forget that the rest of the time. A clock on a wall feels like the most reliable thing in a room. It has no motive, it never gets tired and it wants nothing from you. When it says ten past one, we believe it far more readily than we would believe a person saying the same words. Yet a clock only ever tells you what somebody set it to say, and on Sunday it will say ten past one twice, an hour apart, with a perfectly straight face. Ask a house with a kitchen clock, a car clock, a phone and an old carriage clock on the landing what time it is during that second hour, and you may well get four answers, each delivered with complete confidence.

This is the whole engine of the kind of story I write. A mystery is rarely about a lie told by a person. Readers are good at spotting those; they have met people. It is far more often about a fact everyone agreed on too early: the church bell that was heard at midnight, the last train that always leaves at a quarter past, the ferry timetable pinned up in the waiting room. The real work is to go back to the thing nobody thought needed checking and ask who wound it, who set it, and who would have noticed if it had been nudged. The person with the perfect alibi is not interesting because they are lying. They are interesting because their alibi rests on an object, and objects are only as honest as the last hand that touched them.

The repeated hour does something stranger too: it splits a night in two without anyone choosing where. If you wake at half past one on Sunday, the clock on the wall cannot tell you which half past one you are in. The phone knows, because underneath it is counting in a different way altogether. The wall clock has no idea, and that small gap between what the room says and what is true is precisely the feeling I try to put on the page: the tide gone quiet, the corridor where the floorboard should have creaked, the sense that a house is keeping time by its own rules.

So my argument is simply this: do not sleep through it. This year the hour arrives in the small hours after Halloween, when the pumpkins on the doorsteps have burned down to a glow and the street has finally gone still, and I can think of no better excuse to stay up. Leave one old clock unchanged until morning. Sit with a cup of tea at five to two and watch the phone slip back to one. Notice how quickly the room accepts it, and how quickly you do. Then wonder how many other times this year you believed a clock because it was easier than asking.

I once built a whole book around that question. The House of Seven Clocks begins with a man who stopped every clock in his house with his own hands on his seventieth birthday and then vanished, and with the restorer hired forty years later to make them tick again. Seven clocks, seven stopped times, and every one of them set by somebody, for a reason. That is the first thing she has to remember about them, and the first thing the rest of us will forget this weekend, somewhere around ten past one.