It’s All a Matter of Luck! Change to summertime in Spain 2023

Hurry, hurry! Only eight billion years left to extinction! Our solar system will be transformed by the ageing sun before coming to a spectacular end in about eight billion years or so. I'm particularly fond of those words "about" and "or so."

Will there be fireworks? Extinction parties with no hangover the morning after? Sign me up! I'm just as relieved as you are that I'm not going to be living some 8 billion years from now. Or so. At least I don't think I will.

Everything depends on our place in history, doesn't it? Sometimes history itself can be altered depending where people are. If the police hadn't been several hours late arriving at a house in Shanghai in 1921, they could have arrested the entire communist party, who took over the country 28 years later.

China today might have been very different if one police officer hadn't gone back just before the raid to pick up his warrant card. I don't think he would have bothered these days.

In more recent times, during the worst of the Covid panic, the Pandemic Response Committee was referred to -- by its members, no less -- as the Stable Door Group. You see what they did there? It was sort of like one of those government inquiries whose final report has been written before the inquiry panel meets. Still, they usually meet in pleasant air-conditioned luxury to discuss things like global warming and third-world poverty.

Luck -- that fickle friend -- also plays a part in human misery at times. Check the midges/mosquito/military/salmonella situation before travelling to the Highlands of

Scotland/Los Angeles, the most mosquitoinfested city in America/North Korea/any restaurant of your choice in Mexico City. You are lucky, travelling to any of those locations, if your boat to Skye or flight into danger is cancelled.

People often like to warn us of unlucky things to avoid. This unwanted advice usually begins with the words, "You won't need me to tell you -- " before they proceed to tell you. Recently someone counselled me that it was too late to learn to play the bagpipes, "as many elderly gentlemen sometimes mysteriously do." At least he called me a gentleman, I was thinking, before he added, "No one would ever do that if he expected to be doing it for long."

I only wish I had thought to remind him that a gentleman is a man who can play the bagpipes, but doesn't. But just my luck, that particular riposte slipped my mind, what's left of it.

With the arrival of the month of March, the days will get longer and longer as it gets dark later, a sign that the time change is approaching to make way for summertime. Thus, this change will take place on the last Sunday of March when the hands of the clock will go forward one hour, so that and at 2am it will be 3am (official peninsular time), overnight Saturday, March 27 to Sunday, March 28, 2023. As such, the night will have one hour less, and the day will last 23 hours instead of 24 hours.

In the case of the Canary Islands, this change will occur an hour before, so at 1am it will become 2am.

The purpose of the two-time changes that occur each year is to adjust the working day with daylight hours, in such a way that more natural light is used, and we can all make energy savings.

However, this method of time change is always under constant debate, since there are detractors who do not see it as necessary, contrary to what is regulated in Directive 2000/84/CE of the European Parliament or of the Council, of 19 January 2001, which deals with the regulation regarding the change of summer time in all the countries that make up the European Union.

Although the change to summertime occurs in March, the truth is that the summer season does not begin until 3 months later, in the month of June.

The time change actually corresponds to the beginning of spring, which begins on Monday, March 20, 2023, at 10:24 p.m. However, already during this transition season, the days begin to last longer, and temperatures begin to rise, giving way to summer. The summer season will officially begin Wednesday, June 21, 2023, at 1:58 p.m., according to the National Geographic Institute (IGN).