We changed to summer time last weekend. What a pointless activity! Why must people have such fixed schedules that they rely on the government to tell them when to get up?

Here’s a story that highlights the absurdity.

Sandringham time is the name given to the idiosyncratic alterations that King Edward VII made to the timekeeping at the royal estate of Sandringham. In order to create more time for hunting in the winter, the King ordered that all the clocks on the estate be set half an hour ahead of Greenwich Mean Time.

One wonders why Edward didn’t just change the times of breakfast and supper. There’s something reminiscent of Cnut’s hubris in it.