I couldn’t believe it when I first saw it – after a seemingly endless sweltering summer, I spotted my first glittering frost of the year yesterday.
To me, that means the seasons have properly changed. It’s time for me to break out the soup recipes, get going on some very involved crafts, and start taking my vitamin D.
And I’ll need to change my morning routine to ensure I get some early sunlight, too. That trick has helped me adjust to the clocks going forward for years now.
When do the clocks go back in 2026?
In the UK, they always go back on the last Sunday of October.
This year, that date falls on 25 October at 2am.
That means you’ll get an extra hour in bed on the morning of 25 October.
Why do the clocks go back?
Benjamin Franklin may have been the first person to propose daylight saving time in 1784. It had other advocates after that, too.
But the campaigns of a Kent builder called William Willett really got the ball rolling in the UK.
Willett – who, by the way, is related to Coldplay’s Chris Martin – noticed drawn curtains on a sunny summer dawn while riding around the country one day.
That supposed “waste” bothered him so much, he self-funded a pamphlet called The Waste Of Daylight. Originally, Willett wanted the clocks to adjust by 80 minutes per season in four instalments rather than an hour at a time.
This eventually caught the attention of MP Robert Pearce, who promoted the idea in the House of Commons.
Over time, some countries warmed to the idea. A week after Willett’s death in 1916, Germany implemented the change, with the UK following weeks later.
In a pro-daylight savings time speech after Willett’s campaigns, Winston Churchill once said, “An extra yawn one morning in the springtime, an extra snooze one night in the autumn… We borrow an hour one night in April, we pay it back with golden interest five months later”.
However, experts don’t all agree that we actually feel the benefits of this. Harvard Health says only a “minority” of people actually catch 60 minutes more Zzzs.
Instead, most of us face disrupted sleep patterns and early wake-ups in the week after the change.
