AN extra hour in bed is small consolation for the dreariness of standard time. These are the steps you will work through as you adjust to omnipresent darkness.
Denial
Surely it can’t be barely 4pm and already looking this bleak? There must be an error with your highly technologically advanced phone and every other infallible digital device. Perhaps it’s just very cloudy today, or maybe an immersive theatre experience is putting on a play about the Great Smog. Winter can’t have come yet; normal, slightly less shit weather will resume soon.
Hating farmers
Your brain has ruled out migrants and benefits scroungers, but surely someone must be to blame for this antiquated time-f**kery? Then you remember that clocks only change because farmers needed to milk their cows at stupid o’clock during the war. This gives you the perfect excuse to eat mechanically recovered meat that’s never been near a farmer and shun vegetables for Doritos. That’ll show those bastards.
Bargaining
The sun may be a merciless ball of blinding plasma at the heart of the solar system, but even it must want something. Perhaps if you promise to start worshipping it again and apologise for forsaking it in favour of God then it will bless you with lighter evenings. Just make sure to do this in private because you will look like a twat.
Half-arsed political engagement
Seeing as time is a societal construct, it’s the government’s responsibility to sort out these dank, depressing evenings. Typically there’s nothing in Labour’s manifesto about the clocks going back, so you’ll think about firing off an email to your local MP before realising it’s too much effort. Your plan, as with everything, is to vote Reform and blindly hope those inexperienced tossers will fix things somehow.
Defy society’s expectations
You’re no NPC sheep. After getting radicalised by anti-standard time content, you’ll start flouting the so-called rules of the autumn equinox. If gender can be fluid, why can’t your grasp of the numbers on a clock be similarly mutable? It’s not 8am in your reality until it’s light out, which means you’re allowed to sleep in and be late for work. If anyone disagrees, they’re cancelled.
Acceptance
You’re not French. They would have instantly taken to the streets over meddling with time. As a Brit though your apathy will kick in and you’ll soon embrace seasonal depression and being Vitamin D deficient. In a few days you’ll be resigned to the misery, leaving you primed to be pissed off when you lose an hour in summer.
