The clocks go back this weekend, and your routine is allowed to wobble

This coming Sunday the clocks go back in Britain and across much of Europe, and the mornings you had just about made peace with will be dark again. There is an extra hour in it somewhere, everyone says, as if an hour arrives gift wrapped. What actually arrives is a fortnight of waking in the wrong light and feeling, for no reason you can name, that you have slipped.

You have not slipped. You have changed hemispheres of the day. Here are the small things I notice every year, offered in case they spare you the guilt.

The habit you kept all summer is not broken, it has lost its daylight. The walk that was easy at seven was easy partly because it was bright at seven. Move it, do not mourn it. A walk at lunchtime still counts.

The body takes about a week to believe the new time, and no amount of discipline hurries it. If you are tired at an hour that used to feel fine, that is biology keeping its own books, not a character flaw.

The dark morning wants less of you, not more. This is the worst fortnight of the year to start a punishing new regime, and oddly the one when people most often do. Begin nothing in the last week of October that you would not forgive yourself for dropping by November.

A light helps more than a lecture. A lamp on while you have your first cup, the curtains open to whatever grey there is, five minutes by a window. The eyes need to be told it is daytime even when the sky is stalling.

Begin nothing in the last week of October that you would not forgive yourself for dropping by November.

Tea tastes better in the dark morning than it has any right to. I have no theory for this. I simply offer it as a reason to get up.

And the thing I have learned to do above all else is lower the bar on purpose for two weeks. Not abandon the routine, lower it. The reader who writes two sentences instead of a page in late October is still a writer in November. The one who waits to feel like themselves again before they start is usually still waiting at Christmas.

The light comes back. It always does, a minute or two a day, and by the time you have stopped noticing the dark it will have quietly turned. A habit you keep gently through the worst fortnight of the year is worth three you keep fiercely in the easy months. Be kind to the version of you that has to get up tomorrow in the dark. That one needs a friend, not a timetable.

If the darker mornings are taking your quiet hour with them, The Quiet Hour is about finding and protecting one without losing sleep or chasing perfection.