Messing about with the clocks. A bit of grammar police commentary.,

Yesterday we put the clocks back an hour. This gave me an extra hour in bed. A friend who used to work for the fire brigade was commiserating with former colleagues who might be working the night shift. If you are on the night shift you work through the moment when the clocks automatically change (well, the electronic devices such as mobile phones and iPads) but you still work until it is officially your finishing time. So if you began work at 8.00pm and you are due to go off duty at 8.00am, for example, instead of working 12 hours you will have worked 13 hours, because in “old money” it’s 9.00am. This is fine if management recognises his and adjusts the pay accordingly, but in practice this does not happen. The people affected are largely firemen, ambulance drivers, policemen, nurses and doctors - public service workers! 

Presumably at the other end of the year, when we put the clocks forwards an hour, a 12 hour shift becomes an 11 hour shift. Does that mean that the workers get paid for 12 hours when only working 11? And how do you check that it is the same workers? 

The fact remains that the days are shorter and it now goes dark at about 5.00 pm. This is particularly depressing as the rain seems to have returned. 

Seamus O’Reilly was writing about his son in his column, as he often does. This time he was lamenting the fact that the now six year old boy no longer regards him as “the font of all knowledge” but is likely to turn to Alexa for information. So it goes! But maybe the child will soon tell him that the correct expression is “fount of all knowledge”. Even though “font” and “fount” both come from the same Latin root, “fount” means a source, while a “font’ in the stone basin in church containing holy water. 

You have to get these things right, especially if you are a bit of a grammar policewoman like me.

Running through the village I noticed this sign, with careless punctuation, the sort you see all over the place, I am sorry to say:

A friend of mine suggested that maybe it meant that only one office office was available, as in ‘Office is to rent”. Hmm! I’m still not impressed!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!