Now that we run three mornings a week, we’re both noticing the inevitable, inexorable onset of winter. A few weeks ago we could run down by the river and watch the sun come up. This morning we switched to running on the road, in under the amber glow of the street lights. It’s not nearly so pleasant, pretty or healthy to be running through those fumes.

Nobody likes the darker mornings, and fewer still welcome the gloomy evenings, which mean that night has already fallen by the time you leave work. No wonder the drive to abandon GMT once and for all is gathering support from the likes of RoSPA, Age Concern and the CBI, which reckons that standardising on European time would be good for business.

Yet this weekend we’ll be rolling back the clocks once more, and while it may give us another couple of weeks of sunrise running it also means we’ll all spend more time living under artificial light later on in the day.

That might have made sense once, but not any more. Stuart Hampson explains why in today’s Times Online:

When Britain was an agricultural nation, people got up at first light, spent the daylight hours working outdoors and relied on candles and firelight after sunset. For many today, a typical day runs from 7am to 11pm, so the middle of that day isn’t noon but 3pm. There is a total mismatch between daylight and waking hours.

“Daylight saving time”, introduced in 1916, shifts our clocks forward an hour for seven months of the year. This was still geared to agricultural priorities, allowing farmers to work later on the harvest in daylight. It simply fails to recognise how we now live.

But Hampson’s most compelling argument for synchronising our clocks with the rest of Europe has less to do with the fact that GMT is an outdated construct, and more that lighter evenings mean we’ll use less energy lighting our homes, streets and office.

That, surely, is good enough reason to do away with one winter tradition we could all do without.

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