West London, Sunday morning:
I hope you remembered to put the clocks back. But should you have done so? Politicians often bottle this issue. The FT pundit, John Kay, argued the other day that, since most of us are not longer governed by agricultural habits or the lack of electrical lighting, it would be smarter to put them forward not backwards - further forward at that.
Why so? Because the annual return to GMT - and its continental variations affecting 300 million Europeans - means that some of us will still be abed in relative daylight and be caught by darkness in late afternoon when more of us are up and about.
An Englishman called William Willett dreamed up what Americans call daylight saving (their clocks go back next weekend) 100 years ago. It soon caught on, deployed by both sides in World War I. But politicians are wary of it and - in our tall thin island - the Scots get cross. I can already hear Alex Salmond holding forth at this weekend's triumphant party conference in Aviemore about the English stealing Scotland's daylight.
True, but only up to a point. A crossbench peer and amateur astrologer called Lord Tanlaw got short shrift the last time (2006) he called for double summer time in summer and a one-hour forward movement of clocks in winter. An experiment was tried in 1968-71, but might be worth another go if the government (full of Scots) changed its mind. It's easier in France - it's a hexagon.
Many of the FT's wealthy City readers will be unaffected since nowadays they have to start work so early in our globalised financial economy. So it was good to read that Peter Durose, Tesco's £250,000 a year head of fresh produce purchase, has given up his successful but time-poor 14-hour-a-day career to open an organic British fruit and veg store in a Hertfordshire village. Instead of selling £3 mn worth of apples a week, he knows sells them at 40p a pound.
There are several excellent jokes in the Sunday papers. including the Sunday Times which is not famous for its sense of humour. It accuses Mark Thompson, top man at the BBC, of calling Tessa Jowell ''Mrs Shit for Brains'' when she was culture secretary and he was at Channel 4.
Hardly wit in the Oscar Wilde class, but the joke ties in young Tess's wholesome response. ''I would stake my life on the fact that Mark never, ever said that about me. He invited me to his 50th birthday party,'' she told the paper. Innocence is like armour plate, a protective shield you can't penetrate.
The paper's account of the clam dredged from the Atlantic seabed off Iceland and found to be 405 years old is also enhanced by the fact that the little chap was promptly named Ming.
Unfair to Sir Ming, late leader of the Lib Dems, I hear you cry ? Perish the unkind thought. It is named after the Chinese dynasty of that name which came to power about time the mollusc was born (are they born?). How do we know how old Ming (alas, he also died when disturbed) was? You count the layers in its shell under a microscope.
The Sunday Times also reports that newly declassified documents show that Henry Kissinger was advised by State Department officials in the mid-70s that diplomats on the scene did not much rate the chances of the new Tory leader, one Margaret Thatcher.
''Unfortunately for her prospects of becoming a national, as distinct from party leader, she has over the years acquired a distinctly upper middle class personal image,'' said one memo which also noted her plumy voice, ''quick, if not profound, mind'' and tendancy to be patronising.
All fair enough, except that they missed the point; as an Establishment outsider and a woman Thatcher could do things the chaps couldn't. Harvard-educated chaps in the diplomatic couldn't spot that any more than their Oxbridge counterparts of the period could.
That, incidentally, is why Monty Python sketches are still funny, but still shockingly misogynistic. But a lot of diplomatic telegrams, especially from grander embassies (some of the small ones are terrific) are guff, as FoI requests nowadays often demonstrate. It comes from reading the local newspapers. The same Americans seemed to think that Jacques Chirac, then an up and coming French political rascal, would better serve US interests. Ho hum
By coincidence yesterday I attended a ''40 Years On'' fund-raising lunch (it wasn't called that) at my old college, UCL off London's Euston Rd. UCL now has 4,300 staff - about the number of students in my day - and has touching on 20,000 students this autumn.
Among the world's 25,000 universities it is ranked No 25 by the smart Shanghai Jiao-Tong university league table and has 20 Nobel laureates. Not bad. The last time I attended a bash there the speaker was Jonathan Ross, who was touchingly grateful for the opportunites UCL opened for him (it certainly did!). So are we all.
An ex-diplomat among our number yesterday complained over lunch at the way the Blair-Brown government has slashed the Foreign Office budget and piled what will soon by £8 bn a year to spend by Dfid, the department for international development.
''It was done to placate Clare Short,'' someone else tells me. Not fair, but Douglas Alexander whose Dfid budget grows and grows is more of a Brown favourite than Ms Short ever was his or TB's.
Jane Fenoulhet, a delightful 20th century Dutch literature specialist who sits next to me, reveals that the Dutch-speaking Flemings whose taxes support the French-speaking Walloon south of deeply-divided Belgium, have what amounts to an embassy in London. Didn't know that.
She is also hopeful that Afrikaaner literature will be better known in the wider world now that the taint of apartheid has been lifted from South Africa. The Dutch took the Cape from the Portuguese and lost it to the British after 1815. But settlers were calling themselves Afrikaan a century earlier and claim theirs is the only authentic white language - not a mere dialect but created - not imported into Africa. A sensitive claim.
Jane says the Boers discarded the ''Mother country'' stuff with the Netherlands long ago - as British ex-colonies only lately did. But ties are ties. UCL has fourth generation Hong Kong Chinese in its law department and yesterday's guest from furthest away, a Nigerian oil engineer, flew in from Lagos - and will fly home today.
Footnote: I see it is being routinely held against Gordon Brown that Speaker Martin ''rebuked'' him last week after accusing David Cameron of '' misleading people'' over his interpretation of the Gould report into the mess made of Scots ballot papers on May 3.
As Brown tried to explain above the hub-bub all the main parties sought to put their convenience ahead of voter comprehensive in designing the ballot paper for Scotland, But Labour was in charge - Mr Alexander actually - so it's mainly Labour 's fault.
But what the Speakers said on Wednesday (Col 285) was :
'' Order. Let me consult ( Hon Members:'' Withdraw!). I call for temperate language.''
It is clear from context that the plea was directed at everyone who was bellowing at the time - quite possibly GB among them. But when the media turns against someone it's hard to reverse the Gadarene flight.
PS: No, I don't know whether the Royal blackmail allegations were serious or a scam. But I suspect we will all know quite soon. Until then, a moment for fantasising, malicious or otherwise.
